Chrome offers a very comparable experience. The truth is, I don’t miss much about Safari at this point. I’ve also been able to find Chrome extensions that approximate my must-have Safari extensions, including a Click to Flash substitute called FlashBlock.Ĭhrome’s extension community is even more vibrant than Safari’s, which means it’s easy to customize the browser to your liking. It’s fast, it doesn’t slow down under heavy browsing pressure, and it doesn’t bog down the rest of my system, either. In short, there’s now a lot more reason for me to love Chrome. There’s a preference to configure the Tab key’s behavior so that it hops only between form fields (and not links) the location bar works more consistently with my expectations Command- and Option-based keyboard shortcuts (for opening links and submitting forms in new windows, or for downloading linked files, respectively) now work dragging images out of the browser works better and the browser is far more stable than it was the last time I tried it. I’ve been delighted to discover that Chrome’s developers have addressed at least five of my seven complaints about the browser. Those browsers don’t feel Mac-like enough to me, no matter how I try.

And, as I mentioned, I’d previously found seven reasons that I couldn’t turn to Chrome. It’s comfortable, I have a few extensions that I’m partial to, and change is hard. The switcher campaignĭespite my numerous complaints about Safari, I was hesitant to abandon it. Safari 5.1 gobbles up a lot more CPU than Chrome does. (The fix? Kill that Safari Web Content process in Activity Monitor-which in turn means all your tabs need to be reloaded again.) When Safari started behaving that badly, the rest of my Mac would inevitably start choking right along with it. And that makes Safari 5.1 grind to a near standstill, as tab content is endlessly purged, making the browsing process take much longer than it should. When I write a Weekly Wrap for Macworld, or if I’m researching a product to buy, I can end up with two or three dozen tabs open on my screen.

Even if there’s no form data to lose, this behavior still means that you get to wait for the page to load all over again. Like the iPad and iPhone, Safari for Mac now refreshes tabs’ content when you go back to them if you haven’t viewed them in a while, which can wipe out any content you’ve entered into a form. I don’t know why, but Safari Web Content just doesn’t behave very well. The problem is that Safari’s implementation is flawed, and Apple hasn’t fixed it yet.

Safari or chrome for mac