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Google Improving Chrome for OS X Performance to Better Rival Safari

Brenzo said:
Curious for those who work back and forth between Windows & Mac, but use Chrome on Windows and Safari on Mac, how do you deal with syncing bookmarks, history, passwords, etc.?

Also, I always found Safari's tab management to be less than ideal compared to Chrome, especially the lack of favicons to easily visualize what is on each tab.
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The Xmarks extension worked very well for bookmarks when I tried it in the past, but since I have Chrome/Safari on nearly all my devices, I'm currently just using the respective browser when necessary. For password syncing, use a manager such as 1Password.
And there are extensions to add favicons last I checked, but I haven't tried any myself. It looks like El Capitan's Safari should bring favicons to Safari, at least for pinned tabs.
kwokaaron said:
I don't want 'on par'. Really, shouldn't you set your goals higher and go for 'better'? Also, some of those results are still horrible compared to Safari... but I guess that's better than nothing.
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I believe they mean "on par" in the context of the improvements they've seen so far, not necessarily what their goals are.
 
horsebattery said:
I believe they mean "on par" in the context of the improvements they've seen so far, not necessarily what their goals are.
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I hope so. This is the biggest problem I have with Chrome. That and scrolling still isn't as smooth as Safari. If not for this I would have switched over from Safari.
 
Brenzo said:
Also, I always found Safari's tab management to be less than ideal compared to Chrome, especially the lack of favicons to easily visualize what is on each tab.
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In El Capitan safari will display favicons for pinned tabs. I'd like them for all tabs as well but it's a start.
 
kwokaaron said:
I hope so. This is the biggest problem I have with Chrome. That and scrolling still isn't as smooth as Safari. If not for this I would have switched over from Safari.
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They're definitely working on it. The Macrumors article also cut off the original posting to exclude this:
The Chrome team has no intention of sitting idly by (pun intended) when our users are suffering. You should expect us to continually improve in this area.
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How much effort they're putting into the OSX/iOS versions though, that's a different issue. At this point, Windows'/Android's version are likely still priority. Apple has the benefit of not needing to support Safari on any other platforms though, and Safari's been a pretty horrid experience then.

I've never really had any gripes with scrolling issues on either Safari or Chrome, unless it's particularly apparent as well as to the point where it's plain unresponsive. I do recall that the Chrome team is working on it though. I did notice jankiness with either browsers in the past, but it seems to have usually been due to poorly written sites, not so much the browsers themselves; ads can get particularly egregious in this regard.
 
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Until Apple allow us grown ups to be able to select our own default browsers and email clients, it's totally irrelevant what Google or anybody else does to their software sadly.
 
baryon said:
I knew it! I wasn't just imagining things, Safari was faster than Chrome (in many aspects)! I always thought the two must be the same since they're both webkit and all, but I always felt that Safari was faster and assumed I'm just being stupid.
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Chrome for OSX uses Blink, which is a Google fork of WebKit.
 
SgtPepper12 said:
Firefox is at it's worst condition since it was launched, I don't know what the hell the developers are doing here. It's extremely CPU and memory hungry and it's implementations of CSS3 and HTML5 are also the worst of all browsers (I actually had to change the code because Firefox was the only browser that couldn't handle one particular bit of CSS3). So stay away from Firefox and if you need/want an alternative to Safari, look into Opera, it's actually a great browser and overlooked for no good reason.
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What CSS3 rules exactly was Firefox not supporting?
 
It's already fast on OS X. Maybe they should go back to the drawing board regarding bookmarks, because the new bookmarks system sucks complete ass. It wasn't good before, but now it's just frustrating.
 
here's the problem I have with Safari, and why I will continue using Chrome - it's no longer cross platform, and it syncs the all my bookmarks/extensions across all the computing devices (both Macs and PCs) I use.

I use a PC at work, and Chrome has everything all my settings/bookmarks synced to that computer. Because Safari will not be offering that, I will stick with Chrome.
 
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usamaah said:
I like the performance in Safari but the UI of Chrome (like someone else said earlier).

But I'm sticking with Chrome for when I'm plugged in on a Mac (90% of the time) and even half the time I'm unplugged because I jump between different OSes weekly (Windows, OS X, iOS, Android) and having the ability to sync across all these devices is great. Firefox is the alternative but I prefer Chrome.
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bingo, exactly. I use more than just Apple devices.
 
Chrome is an OS. When you run "just the browser" you are running a bunch of other apps. As it's part of its own self-contained operating system. This is even more obvious when running it in Windows; it's a pig. I actually suffer with IE in Windows 8.1 as I tire of Chrome's CPU/MEM footprint.

IE, via the iCloud plugins, syncs with Safari in both iOS and OSX. So I continue to enjoy homogeny as far as bookmarks go at least.

I also don't like that Chrome's touted feature of where ever you are, your stuff is. I know many here love that, but when I am at work I do not want my usernames and passwords or history saved on the computer. Setting those settings ripples (aka syncs) to all my Chrome installs. So then when at home when I *do* want such features I have to switch it all back on again. Then when I go back to work, clear all data and turn it off. PAIN.

Chrome does offer "profiles" but this is just "another thing to manage." IE with iCloud sync (windows) and Safari (OSX/iOS) seems to be the best solution for my needs.
 
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mikeray said:
What CSS3 rules exactly was Firefox not supporting?
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It was some issue with min-height/height (min-height was ignored). Maybe Firefox was the only one doing it correctly (which resulted in showing nothing) and the other three got it wrong, I don't know. But it's not that dramatic, it's just something that wasn't exactly a plus point either, in particular not a plus point that outweighed the fact that firefox tried to burn a hole through my mac (which is apparently a memory leak and not the first one I observed with firefox). Bottom line is: Stay away from Firefox on Mac (it runs pretty well on Linux though). It doesn't come close to the performance of the other three browsers and seems to have some serious issues with memory usage.
 
I am not sure what everyone is talking about, but I am using Chrome on Mavericks with a 2008 macbook and its fast, very reliable, and has the best shortcuts and functions. Safari and Firefox would often stutter and have issues especially when loading multiple tabs.
 
Dargoth said:
It's a tough call... On the one hand, there's tremendous exposure on the App Store and on the other hand you sacrifice a ton of coding freedom by being bound by a restrictive sandbox. Some apps are just not viable (or possible) on the App Store.
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I don't know that the exposure from being on the Mac App Store is really all that great. I got far more downloads from being featured by MacWorld than I ever got just by virtue of having a best in class app on the Mac App Store.

For future applications, I have no plans of going through the App Stores. For iOS, I'm going strictly web based. I've found little that I can do natively that I can't reproduce in a web app, particularly with WebGL now enabled in iOS 8. For OS X, I may release native apps, but I'll probably just distribute them myself rather than via the App Store.
 
as long as Safari continues to NOT show the favicons on Tabs i will stay with Chrome.
 
Safari is the fastest browser, that is the fact. Safari is by far the best when it comes to energy consumption. Also a fact.

But the biggest problem Safari has aren't extensions, or lack of favicons. Problem is Safari is too basic for a lot of users. I mean, Safari can't even remember page zooming. And that is just plain silly. But when I'm on battery, I use only Safari coz of low energy consumption.

But Chrome is no better, since Chrome even with 10000 extensions is pretty basic browser. I used to use Opera all the time. Until they dropped Presto after Opera 12. Tab stacking, window management, sessions, mail, rss, syncs, per site preferences, tab stacking, and a lot of real power features that all other browser combined with their extensions couldn't match.

But that Opera died when they switched to Blink engine. But even now Opera is better then Chrome. Does all the things Chrome can do, you can even use Chrome extensions if you wish, but you can still customize it a little bit.

But my main player now is Vivaldi. Ex-Opera team started that project, it's still in alpha, but even now it's far more powerful then any other browser. But it will take time for them to reach old Opera. I'm willing to wait, since for me and my liking, all other browsers are like kids toys compared to alpha version of Vivaldi.

Except Safari. I will use Safari when ever I'm on battery, since no other browser can compete with Apple on that department.
 
Hmmm not a fan of Safari's UI so I've always used chrome but if it better performance wise and battery life wise maybe I'll give Safari another try. Guess I'll lose my hand off ability though since there is no safari for Android. o_O
 
c0ppo said:
Safari is the fastest browser, that is the fact. Safari is by far the best when it comes to energy consumption. Also a fact.

But the biggest problem Safari has aren't extensions, or lack of favicons. Problem is Safari is too basic for a lot of users. I mean, Safari can't even remember page zooming. And that is just plain silly. But when I'm on battery, I use only Safari coz of low energy consumption.

-snip-

But my main player now is Vivaldi. Ex-Opera team started that project, it's still in alpha, but even now it's far more powerful then any other browser. But it will take time for them to reach old Opera. I'm willing to wait, since for me and my liking, all other browsers are like kids toys compared to alpha version of Vivaldi.

Except Safari. I will use Safari when ever I'm on battery, since no other browser can compete with Apple on that department.
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It sounds like you're simply conflating your specific needs to assume that most people need these "power features" (your words), especially if you are also relegating the other browsers as kid's toys. Unless of course, battery life is an issue. Then using a toy is perfectly suitable.
 
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macintologist said:
The performance difference between Safari and Chrome is like night and day. On websites where Safari scrolls in 60 frames per second, Chrome stutters. All you have to do is look at the CPU utilization when Chrome runs a specific website and compare that to Safari, and you will see exactly why I never use Chrome.
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I was a Chrome user and I had to fiddle with the hidden configuration flags to enable graphic acceleration. Not sure about current versions, but back then it made a huge difference on the performance and was not enabled by default.

Safari has become much better especially in the last major versions so I ditched Chrome as my main browser, but there are still a few interesting features Safari should "borrow" from Chrome. One example is the ability to play webm videos: I'm actually encountering them more and more often and it's annoying that Safari is not able to play them.
 
iBlazed said:
Will it work with handoff from my iPhone? No? Not happening then.
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If you use Chrome on your iPhone too it will actually work: Chrome had "tab sync" across devices long before Safari.

But as far as I know iOS Chrome still doesn't use the accelerated Javascript API, so it should still run Javascript much slower than iOS Safari.
 
Chrome is my primary browser at work because there are some poorly written internal web sites that don't work on Safari. I also make good use of the extensions available on Chrome that aren't on Safari. The Jira plugin comes to mind. Ghostery, Postman REST Client, and some others are really nice in Chrome.

Also, Safari can either block popups or not. There doesn't seem to be any way to whitelist sites where popups are nessa. There used to be a keyboard combo that would switch popup blocking on/off. That keyboard combo is gone.

HEY, I just found Ghostery for Safari. Cool!

I'd use Safari if it weren't for the above mentioned annoyance. I'm REALLY glad I have a choice!
 
bsolar said:
If you use Chrome on your iPhone too it will actually work: Chrome had "tab sync" across devices long before Safari.

But as far as I know iOS Chrome still doesn't use the accelerated Javascript API, so it should still run Javascript much slower than iOS Safari.
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Well in that case, insert generic anti-google comment here. :p
 
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