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I’ve been using Safari as my ‘relaxation browser’ for ages; Chrome never felt “right” to me, even though I use it every day for development and various other re

I’ve been using Safari as my ‘relaxation browser’ for ages; Chrome never felt “right” to me, even though I use it every day for development and various other reasons. Interestingly enough, I’ve heard the same thing as you just pointed out, out of a lot of people since Lion. A lot of people who had previously laughed at me for remaining with Safari (as if it’s somehow inherently inferior to Chrome? I’ve never quite understood it.) are now, themselves, switching back … just for gestures, as far as I can tell. I have to ask: Is it really that much of a life-changing feature for you, in a browser?

fortybillion 15y ago
My behaviour is pretty much the same — Safari for personal browsing, Chrome for dev. Chrome is very nice, but Safari is a lot more "solid", especially when it comes to 3D Transforms and other advanced features. Safari 5.1 on Lion isn't a life changer, but the gestures just feel right. Going back to Chrome feels like taking a step backwards, especially on a Magic Mouse where the double-finger-sideways swipe is still somewhat awkward.
Pewpewarrows 15y ago
I enjoyed Safari for about an hour in Lion (because of the gestures, and how they broke in Chrome), and then immediately went right back to Chrome. Apple's done a lot to improve Safari over the years (especially recently), but it's still not close to where it needs to be for everyday browsing. Development is pretty equal, although I'll always find myself using Chrome over it because of Chrome's much, much faster release schedule of improvements to Webkit's tools. Safari gets them... eventually. Eventually isn't good enough these days, when entire new pieces of technology appear in the span of months. For regular browsing, I can't stand not having: * Favicons on the tabs. It's impossible to glance at 5+ tabs in Safari without getting completely lost. * Favicons on the bookmarks bar. My bookmarks bar doesn't have a single character on it, it's all just favicons with blank names that makes it into a horizontal list of frequently used sites. * Any sort of Synching. Right now my Chromes at Work, Home Desktop, Laptop, and Tablet are completely in-tune with each other. * A real omnibar/awesomebar. There are some extensions that make this more bearable, but the default address and search bars are pretty worthless.
- fortybillion 15y ago
  I actually find the omnibar incredibly frustrating, as I know when I want to search and I know when I want to find something from my history. For me, these are separate tasks and combining them makes me slower because I have to mentally filter out the unrelated results. I'd love to see Google vs. Apple's research for one vs. the other. It seems to be one of the polarizing issues.
- sirn 15y ago
  If you want a bleeding-edge WebKit development tool, sometimes even more bleeding-edge than Chrome Canary/Chromium build, try out WebKit Nightly. It just swap out Safari's WebKit for Nightly WebKit while the whole Safari experience remains the same. Since the whole inspector stuff was done completely in HTML/JavaScript, you get a more up-to-date development tools with it too. About your other points. >A real omnibar/awesomebar I've found Chrome's Omnibar to be very annoying, to be honest. The last version I tried (probably Chrome 14) still couldn't do substring searching for titles or maybe even URLs. Pressing control for navigation (standard Emacs C-n, C-p stuff) change the ordering of navigation items. I've found it to be very much unpredictable and is one of my main reason of not using Chrome as a primary browser. Firefox's AwesomeBar is awesome, though, only if I could navigate using C-n C-p. >Syncing Xmarks[1] works beautifully across browsers and platforms. I've used it to sync between Safari, Firefox and Chrome without any problems. >Favicons Have you tried out Glims[2]? [1]: http://www.xmarks.com/ http://www.xmarks.com/ [2]: http://wiki.machangout.com/howdoi/glims-development-build http://wiki.machangout.com/howdoi/glims-development-build
  - Pewpewarrows 15y ago
    Chrome's Omnibar is under intense development, and the latest stable version (13) now supports substring matches on almost everything. The flags in 14 and 15 basically turn it completely into Firefox's Awesomebar. Xmarks is ok, but it only covers a fraction of Chrome's synching, which includes Bookmarks, Passwords, Form Input, Extensions, and Preferences. And it's being completely integrated with their forthcoming Profiles feature, which means that I can finally easily switch between dev extensions enabled (which otherwise use a LOT of resources if left on for regular browsing) and normal profiles, and the bookmarks/passwords of a significant other don't interfere with my own. I haven't checked out Glims, so thanks for the link.

fortybillion 15y ago

My behaviour is pretty much the same — Safari for personal browsing, Chrome for dev. Chrome is very nice, but Safari is a lot more "solid", especially when it comes to 3D Transforms and other advanced features. Safari 5.1 on Lion isn't a life changer, but the gestures just feel right. Going back to Chrome feels like taking a step backwards, especially on a Magic Mouse where the double-finger-sideways swipe is still somewhat awkward.

Pewpewarrows 15y ago

I enjoyed Safari for about an hour in Lion (because of the gestures, and how they broke in Chrome), and then immediately went right back to Chrome. Apple's done a lot to improve Safari over the years (especially recently), but it's still not close to where it needs to be for everyday browsing. Development is pretty equal, although I'll always find myself using Chrome over it because of Chrome's much, much faster release schedule of improvements to Webkit's tools. Safari gets them... eventually. Eventually isn't good enough these days, when entire new pieces of technology appear in the span of months. For regular browsing, I can't stand not having: * Favicons on the tabs. It's impossible to glance at 5+ tabs in Safari without getting completely lost. * Favicons on the bookmarks bar. My bookmarks bar doesn't have a single character on it, it's all just favicons with blank names that makes it into a horizontal list of frequently used sites. * Any sort of Synching. Right now my Chromes at Work, Home Desktop, Laptop, and Tablet are completely in-tune with each other. * A real omnibar/awesomebar. There are some extensions that make this more bearable, but the default address and search bars are pretty worthless.

fortybillion 15y ago
I actually find the omnibar incredibly frustrating, as I know when I want to search and I know when I want to find something from my history. For me, these are separate tasks and combining them makes me slower because I have to mentally filter out the unrelated results. I'd love to see Google vs. Apple's research for one vs. the other. It seems to be one of the polarizing issues.
sirn 15y ago
If you want a bleeding-edge WebKit development tool, sometimes even more bleeding-edge than Chrome Canary/Chromium build, try out WebKit Nightly. It just swap out Safari's WebKit for Nightly WebKit while the whole Safari experience remains the same. Since the whole inspector stuff was done completely in HTML/JavaScript, you get a more up-to-date development tools with it too. About your other points. >A real omnibar/awesomebar I've found Chrome's Omnibar to be very annoying, to be honest. The last version I tried (probably Chrome 14) still couldn't do substring searching for titles or maybe even URLs. Pressing control for navigation (standard Emacs C-n, C-p stuff) change the ordering of navigation items. I've found it to be very much unpredictable and is one of my main reason of not using Chrome as a primary browser. Firefox's AwesomeBar is awesome, though, only if I could navigate using C-n C-p. >Syncing Xmarks[1] works beautifully across browsers and platforms. I've used it to sync between Safari, Firefox and Chrome without any problems. >Favicons Have you tried out Glims[2]? [1]: http://www.xmarks.com/ http://www.xmarks.com/ [2]: http://wiki.machangout.com/howdoi/glims-development-build http://wiki.machangout.com/howdoi/glims-development-build
- Pewpewarrows 15y ago
  Chrome's Omnibar is under intense development, and the latest stable version (13) now supports substring matches on almost everything. The flags in 14 and 15 basically turn it completely into Firefox's Awesomebar. Xmarks is ok, but it only covers a fraction of Chrome's synching, which includes Bookmarks, Passwords, Form Input, Extensions, and Preferences. And it's being completely integrated with their forthcoming Profiles feature, which means that I can finally easily switch between dev extensions enabled (which otherwise use a LOT of resources if left on for regular browsing) and normal profiles, and the bookmarks/passwords of a significant other don't interfere with my own. I haven't checked out Glims, so thanks for the link.