A couple weeks ago, I noted that I was going to try using Safari as my main browser. I lasted about a week. For this past week I’ve been back on Chrome, where I’m going to stay.

I take some shit for my undying love of Apple products, but the truth remains — as I’ve always said — that the only requirement for me using anything is that it has to be what I consider the best. Safari is not the best browser, in my mind. Chrome is. 

In my week of using Safari, I have never seen so many beachballs. I have no idea why this was the case day in and day out, I was just doing regular browsing. The type of browsing that Chrome never has any problems with.

In general, Safari seemed noticeably slower than Chrome on everything from startup to rendering. And there were a number of quirks I saw when browsing certain pages that I don’t see with Chrome.

The extensions for Safari were also pretty meh. There are a few good ones, but most seem unnecessarily bloated. 

To be honest, it’s a bit odd to see such a key Apple product that is getting beaten so badly. And it’s weird since I consider mobile Safari to be superior to mobile Chrome. All of the above are based on WebKit.

As I noted, one reason why I wanted to try going back to Safari was that Chrome insisted on coming bundled with Flash, and it causes the browser to crash quite regularly. So I’ve just deactivated it in the browser now. Works like a charm. No crashes yet.

The time with Safari reaffirmed my love for Chrome’s Omnibox and Pinned Tabs. I understand why some people like to have a separate search box, but my god, it just seems like a waste of space to me. As does full size tabs for things like Gmail which I always have open.

Anyways, I’m happy to be back on Chrome.

For no good reason, I decided to use Safari as my main browser today. Actually, there is a pretty decent reason: this. Flash can apparently shave 2 hours off of battery life on the new MacBook Air (and presumably other Macs as well). Chrome comes with Flash baked-in. Safari does not.

Yes, I have a Flash blocker extension installed on Chrome, but Flash has still been crashing my browser left and right in recent weeks. And it’s the only thing that ever seems to strain any of my computers at all. So I’m testing out the Flash-free Safari.

I’ve already noticed a few things I definitely would miss about Chrome:

1) The Omnibox. I don’t know why on Earth all browsers don’t have this. It’s just sort of silly to have two input boxes, one for URLs and one for search. Why not just have one input box to rule them all?

2) Pinned tabs. Tabs in Safari that I always have open, like Gmail, take up way too much space. On the flip-side, it’s nice to be able to see unread counts again.

3) New related tabs opening next to your current tab. A small thing, but I prefer this over related tabs opening at the end of the tab bar (which Safari does).

4) Tab overview. On the Mac version of Chrome, there’s a flag (formerly Labs) you can enable to allow a three-finger swipe down to show you an overview of all the tabs you have open — just like Expose for apps on the Mac. 

Other than that, so far, so good. As a bonus, I’ve noticed that New Twitter is a lot less buggy in Safari too.