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Best MBA broswer? Chrome, Firefox, or Safari

  • Chrome

    Votes: 110 44.4%
  • Firefox

    Votes: 35 14.1%
  • Safari

    Votes: 103 41.5%
  • Oher

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    248

Scuba629

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 14, 2010
249
5
Which is the best browser to use with your MBA? Or which do you find works the best?
 
Macs in general, but specifically Safari SUCK at handling GIF files. If you visit sites that have many of them, you'll have a hell of a time trying to scroll. My 27 Quad i5 can't even render them decently.


I vote Chrome (for now.)
 
Safari as its the only one that properly supports Lion, once Chrome is updated with gestures etc I'm sure I'll go back.
 
I love Chrome for Windows but I find that I prefer Safari for the MBA 11. The speed incredible. I'm also annoyed at how Chrome auto-hides the address bar and tabs in full screen mode. Until that changes and gestures is added I'm sticking with Safari.
 
I tried Safari since its supposed to be integrated better with Lion, but I found it to be sluggish, especially using the new two-finger swipes. I was getting beach-balled far too much so I just went back to Chrome and three finger swipes.
 
For the first time ever, I'm trying safari. I wish they kept the effing keyboard shortcuts universal.

Some command option, some command shift.. work it out apple... and give me a damn gesture to kill a tab, or make it configurable.
 
Browsers are personal and seriously, "best with MBA" ? What type of question is that ? A browser is not better on some piece of hardware.

OS X's best browser right now seems to be Chrome. More up-to-date than Safari on Webkit, leaner, minimalistic GUI, the "task manager", integrated "Firebug" and other dev tools, plenty of extensions (Adblock, Flashblock). Firefox can't compete these days.
 
Just a heads-up from Google. They've already addressed the defective full screen icon on Canary. They simply removed it. You can still go full screen as you did in Leopard, but it won't be treated by Lion as a full screen app. There are no immediate plans to put out a version that supports full screen mode in Lion, but they are discussing how to best implement it. As for gestures, they recommend setting Lion to 3 finger swipes, which will also get you swipe gestures in iTunes and Finder.
 
i love chrome for its speed, but trying out Safari for now, just to see how well gestures are integrated with Lion. so far i'm loving the smoothness of them like the zooms.
 
I like Chrome better in general, and use it all day at work when I'm plugged in, but this latest version of Safari is pretty good on my new 13" i7.

Keep in mind that Chrome uses up more battery. If you plan to go a long time without being plugged in, use Safari.
 
Chrome is just so far ahead of Safari, there's no contest. Unified search/address box, cleaner and quicker to use layout, better extension and app support, google sync (rocks). Bookmarks are for people without integrated Google Instant.

While full screen safari might look flashy in Lion, it's a waste of space even on my 13" air. On my 27" iMac, it's almost comically oversized. I'll take http://manytricks.com/moom/ and Chrome over Lion iOS mode any day.
 
Safari has a serious memory leak in Lion, that and the lack of extensions make me wonder why people would use it.

I use Firefox mostly because the AdBlock+ extension actually blocks video ads properly and from any website. The Chrome version doesn't.
 
Ive always used Firefox but now I guess everyone is going to Chrome. Can Chrome be tweaked with addons or anything? What makes it so popular on Mac?
 
I was wondering why I was losing 4 - 6 gigs of HD space each day, and now I know why. Safari is leaking memory like crazy. That seals the deal. Won't be using that garbage anymore.
 
I've just migrated to Lion from XP last night on a new MBA and love Chrome. It works brilliantly in Windows (apart from a bizarre Hotmail bug).

All my passwords were synced and the all in all, a very pleasant experience. I only used Safari to download Chrome :D.
 
Coming from an ibook G4 running Panther, my experience is that Safari is horrible, iCab 3 is great and Firefox is generic. After getting a 2011 MBA, I still hate Safari - it won't stop accepting web cookies, even though I have it set to refuse them. Firefox is what I'm using now but, I may try Chrome or other alternatives if I find any. I can't really vote here, because it's not a poll about the people's least favorite browsers. I've always been most comfortable using a combination of browsers. Safari is the one which has been useless to me. I only used it to download Firefox with, so that I can use the web on my new MBA.
 
Really have no reason not to use Safari as it does everything I need and provides the few extensions I enjoy having.
 
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