I just came back to Safari from a period of at least a month using Chrome as my primary browser. There are things I like better about Chrome, such as how the URL/search bar behaves and the fact that, if I ever need them, extensions are available. However, the drawbacks slowly but surely outweighed the benefits...
- the New Tab screen, while similar to Safari's "Top Sites", can only display eight sites, whereas I have twelve on Safari (all pinned so they're more of a "favourites of the favourites" type thing), and Safari shows which sites have new content. Thumbnails also couldn't be rearranged in Chrome, although it was clear that was supposed to be possible.
- If any page was loading,
all tabs were unresponsive usually not even scrolling. I'm not exactly on an anemic machine, here. But hey, at least I could switch between the tabs. Go, multi-process browser, go.
- There's virtually no visible indication, other than a tiny spinner, of whether a page is finished loading. (Sadly, Safari is little better as of version 4.) This wouldn't be such a problem if pages loaded quickly or reliably, or if the browser
worked during page loads.
- The Flashblock extension, in addition to not being as "smart" as Click2Flash, caused problems for Flash objects that I did click to allow (one of my favourites was when some video players' mouse response, i.e. clickable areas, was shifted about 10 pixels up from the actual player itself). Flashblock also has a whitelist system that fails to take subdomains into account, so sites like
Bandcamp forced me to whitelist each...individual...artist's...page.
- The AdBlock extension made YouTube unusable, requiring me to open Safari for my recent, nightly
Whose Line Is It Anyway binges and keep Chrome open for everything else. Or, of course, I could disable AdBlock and have ads everywhere.
- Almost randomly, some sites would refuse to load, no matter what, leaving the tab spinning away into eternity.
That's not to say Safari is perfect, either. It takes longer to open, I kind of miss Chrome's address bar, and I grew to appreciate the way Chrome opened tabs next to the current tab instead of at the far end (I know there are Safari plugins that accomplish that, but I used to use Glims and found performance improved when I got rid of it). I think what it comes down to, though, is that Chrome is a beta (and beta-
quality) browser, and Safari is not.