Bye Bye Chrome, I’m back on Safari
I’m going to come right out and type it:
Safari 6 is clearly the best version of Safari I have used. And it might just be the best browser I have ever used.
Let’s talk specifics. Safari 6 has:
- Integrated URL and search bar (finally!)
- blazing fast page loads
- Seamless bookmark syncs between my Macs and my iOS devices
So how good is Safari version 6?
Good enough for me to abandon Google Chrome. Not that there was anything wrong with Chrome, per se, but in my subjective experience, Safari blows the doors off of it in terms of both its overall polish and its blazing fast speed.
From a visual standpoint, Safari’s tabs now stretch to fill the entire width of the window, making it much easier to find and click the tab you want.
One of Safari’s biggest short-comings in the past was its lack of a unified search / URL bar (Omnibar in Google vernacular). Thankfully, Apple’s developers got wise and included an omnibar of its own (dubbed smart search field in Apple parlance) with the version 6 release.
Apple’s synchronized bookmarks go one step better than Google Chrome, by adding iOS into the mix. As a Safari user on my iPhone and iPad, this feature really makes Safari an easy sell for me on the desktop. Now, regardless of whether I’m on my iPhone, iPad, desktop Mac or laptop Mac, I have instant access to all my bookmarks. Finally!
The new version of Safari also features a subtle tweak to the progress bar. Type a URL or search and a light blue gradient filled bar appears. Once the page has loaded, the blue bar fades out.
Safari 6 also makes it easier than ever to share webpages with others via e-mail, Twitter, and Apple’s own Message application. Again, having this built-in social networking feature is super convenient for my day-to-day usage.
You can browse through all existing open tabs by way of a two-pinch gesture on your trackpad. To me, it makes the process of browsing between various open tabs that much faster.
I haven’t yet played around with iCloud tabs (which let you share tabs between Macs running Mountain Lion), so I can’t comment on that. In theory, this has a lot of appeal, but what I’m waiting for is iOS6, which will allow me to share my iCloud tabs with all my iOS devices as well.
What surprises me the most about Safari is how much I like using it now. I’m ditching Chrome and moving back in with Safari. I never thought I’d be typing that after being with Chrome since it came on the scene, but Safari really has come a long way since I last regularly used it. Props must be given to Apple’s developer team for a job well done.
If you’re using Chrome on Mountain Lion, it might be time to give Safari 6 a try once again. You might actually like it as much as I do.
-Krishna
Update: Business Insider has numerical data that compares Safari 6 with Firefox and Chrome. Apple’s browser handily crushes both.
These beautiful and intelligent people wrote
Tell me what you think!
qka
July 27, 2012 at 10:41 pmHow is it on memory use, CPU use and stability? Safari 5, with the Safari Web Content process, is none too stable, and prone to sucking up all the CPU and then losing its mind if you had too many windows/tabs open.
Krishna Sadasivam
July 28, 2012 at 8:10 amSo far, Safari’s well behaved. With 4 tabs open it takes up 120MB of space and uses zero CPU when idle. I’ll test this further.
kaitou
July 28, 2012 at 3:09 pmThe numbers only compare the java-script engines (and, yes, Chrome’s is abysmally slow (~1.79x) compared with Firefox). I’d like to see a comprehensive performance run.
You might try running the html 5 test on http://html5test.com/ (FF-13 got (345+9)/500 and chrome-20 got (414+13)/500 (that’s (reg+bonus)/max)).
I’ll still run Chrome and Firefox as Safari doesn’t run on linux.
Krishna Sadasivam
July 28, 2012 at 3:30 pmThanks for the heads-up, kaitou. I ran that test. Safari 6 scores 376 + 8 bonus points out of 500.
Kevin S
July 28, 2012 at 4:43 pmIf you want to try “iCloud Tabs” now, just download Chrome on your iOS device.
Not only does Chrome for iOS have some neat features, and great gestures, but if you sign-in to your Google account, you can sync tabs in much the same way iCloud tabs works. It’s actually a fantastic feature.
Personally, I can’t give up all the extensions for Chrome. Safari _has_ extensions, but they’re not as numerous or developed.
Mark
July 28, 2012 at 7:04 pmAgree with you 100%! Moved back to Safari after a long stretch with Chrome. I always preferred Safari, but Chrome had move so far ahead. Safari 6 springs to the lead again.
Peter
July 31, 2012 at 5:50 pmNot so thrilled with Safari 6.0. I noticed that some web pages containing comments (like cnn.com articles) continuously reflow/reformat. I thought it was misbehaving so I trekked over to the Acid 3 test and sure enough, it fails miserably.
braytonak
January 1, 2013 at 5:17 pmI just spent a week with Safari having come from Chrome. I was looking forward to the Reader view, the Reading List and iCloud tabs. While those things work well there are things about Safari that bug the living daylights out of me.
As you use the browser you will inevitably have to go back a page. When stepping back a page the browser insists on refreshing the page. You can’t click anything while it does this, nor can you scroll. If it’s one of the ‘infinite scroll’ pages like Flickr, Google Images, or Facebook you will lose your place the majority of the time.
While background tabs are loading the currently viewed tab becomes sluggish and resists scrolling. On some pages, such as Facebook, scrolling is always sluggish, whereas it can be much smoother on other pages. Way to be consistent.
Tabs. The way the tabs stretch to fill the width of the window is annoying. The constantly changing size of tabs means I’m hunting for the Close button, especially if closing multiple tabs at once because they move while you’re clicking them. I hate having to chase the tabs. Chrome will at least hold the size and position of tabs until you move the mouse away.
I’ll give Safari another try in a future version but Safari 6 just doesn’t give me the user experience that I want.