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greg0rn

macrumors member
Original poster
Dec 16, 2009
32
0
Just got my first imac. Beautiful machine to look at, but there are a few things that I have to get used to. One of them is Safari. Actually, I prefer Google. Any comments?
 

MacDawg

Moderator emeritus
Mar 20, 2004
19,823
4,503
"Between the Hedges"
Google is a search engine, Safari is a browser
Do you mean Chrome?

Oh, and congrats on your new machine
I would recommend you put your restore discs that came with it in a safe place
You will need them eventually

And if you don't have an adequate backup strategy, you might want to consider it
Data storage is always cheaper than data recovery
 

mwxiao

macrumors regular
Jul 5, 2007
228
5
CT
Just got my first imac. Beautiful machine to look at, but there are a few things that I have to get used to. One of them is Safari. Actually, I prefer Google. Any comments?

They are both free so why not download both and try out by yourself??
 

Raje

macrumors member
Mar 2, 2010
86
0
If you like chrome use it.

Different people like different browsers. I prefer using firefox on my desktop and chrome on my laptop. My friend uses Opera and won't use anything else and my cousin uses safari. So just use whatever you like best.

And if you like chrome google for chromium and try it.
 

messedkid

macrumors 6502
Jul 8, 2007
474
0
Oshawa, ON
On my mac, I prefer Safari to Chrome.
On my netbook running 7, I prefer Chrome to Safari (and any other browser for that matter.)


Both are great browsers.
 

Alvi

macrumors 65816
Oct 31, 2008
1,207
309
Mars
On a PC i use Chrome, i actually hate Safari for PC it's slow, but on the Mac i just use Safari, it integrates better and is pretty fast.
I don't even miss the Firefox plugins and so on, other mac features like dashboard on OSX make all those things like Firefox plugins and Chrome extensions useless in my workflow

If IE was good you'd use it on a PC
 

AV8TOR

macrumors regular
Mar 8, 2010
169
0
Fort Worth TX
My wife and I both have Yahoo email so I use Safari just for my mail and Firefox is our main browser that we both us and it's home page is her My Yahoo. Firefox is the best though.
 

iammike1

macrumors 6502a
Oct 25, 2007
790
35
O'fallon IL
When I compare the same YouTube video playing in a clean install of Safari vs. a clean install of Chrome....I see a lot more CPU usage with Chrome.

This drove me away because I watch a lot of YouTube and there is no Click2Flash option for Firefox or Chrome.

By the way, I'm not talking like an extra 10% usage. It was like 30ish% in Safari vs. 50+% in Chrome. I was surprised.
 

MacDawg

Moderator emeritus
Mar 20, 2004
19,823
4,503
"Between the Hedges"
When I compare the same YouTube video playing in a clean install of Safari vs. a clean install of Chrome....I see a lot more CPU usage with Chrome.

This drove me away because I watch a lot of YouTube and there is no Click2Flash option for Firefox or Chrome.

By the way, I'm not talking like an extra 10% usage. It was like 30ish% in Safari vs. 50+% in Chrome. I was surprised.

Flashblock for Firefox

Flashblock for Chrome
 

greg0rn

macrumors member
Original poster
Dec 16, 2009
32
0
Thanks to all for quick reply.

Now, perhaps you can help me with installing Google Chrome such a way that its icon replaces Safari icon and it stays permanently at the bottom. The way It is now, it disappears after every shut down of the computer, so I have to upload it from downloads. Thanks.
 

richard.mac

macrumors 603
Feb 2, 2007
6,292
4
51.50024, -0.12662

Arrandale

macrumors regular
Feb 24, 2010
166
1
Safari is much better and renders fonts and pages more aesthetically than chrome.

That said, I find chrome much leaner and more responsive, especially on lower-end hardware. Safari doesn't play well with flash and has a number of bugs that causes it to crash every now and then.

furthermore, safari only sandboxes tabs in snow leopard. chrome does this for the leopard version too.
 

Shunnabunich

macrumors regular
Oct 30, 2005
231
45
Ontario, Canada
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.
 

jackbency

macrumors newbie
Apr 5, 2010
4
0
Actually, I have used both and according to me, Chrome and Safari are good in there own ways. Chrome is open source and Safari is Apple. Chrome is a powerful browser wit limited facilities though Both are based on Webkit and I believe that Webkit is the best rendering engine for any web browser.
 

Harrold

macrumors newbie
Apr 2, 2010
14
0
Chrome is my favourite, sometimes you start it up and you notice new editions to the browser where Google have been updating it.. it's brilliant. :D

I actually have Firefox installed along with Safari too, I usually use other browsers to check my code and make sure it displays correctly.
 
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