I am a developer who spends around 40 hours every week with Google Chrome and decided switching to Safari for 2 weeks. This is the first day after those 2 weeks and I want to share my thoughts on this experience, talking on both positives and negatives.
Navigation
After my first hour with Safari, first thing I noticed was considerable shrink on the screen space while using Safari location bar compared to omnibox on Chrome.
Safari tabs are taking the full width of screen even when there are onyl 2 tabs. And if you are not using your keyboard to navigate between tabs, you will have to focus little bit more to click on those.
It wasn’t really irritating me but, I keep missing the omnibox experience for the whole 2 weeks.
Autocomplete implementation also differs between 2 browsers. While Chrome gives high prio to URLs, Safari gives more priority to Title attibutes on url history. This UX desicion is a love/hate relationship depending on what you are doing currently on your browser, or which website you are on.
Another noticable difference was how back button is working on Safari. While it was more fancy visual effects while going back on the previous page, 50% of the time, there was some miliseconds of freezing until I could scroll on that previous page. I am guessing Safari was doing some work in the background meantime but it took some time to get used to it. Chrome is solving this problem by starting the request as soon as you trigger back button, so you don’t see anything visual until request is completed.
One more thing about navigation; hovering on links.
Sometimes it is enough for me to know where a link is taking me without even clicking on them. This is easy on Chrome by just checking the left bottom corner while hovering over the link. I can’t seem to see any indication on Safari about link location. It can be annoying sometimes to blind-click on a link. Did i just create a new phrase? :)
Resource usage
Safari impressed me so much in this category. There is a huge difference between Safari and Chrome if you are using Mac OS. Both RAM and CPU usage was almost half of what Chrome uses on same tasks.
I am spending quite some time on YouTube watching videos on my free time. Funny thing is, after wathing an HD video with Chrome I can already feel the warm CPU on my lap since my Macbook 12’ doesn’t have any fan. This problem never occurs on Safari, its quite easy on CPU usage while watching videos.
Safari gave me around +2 hours extra battery time comparing to Chrome, which is something I will keep in mind while travelling.
Speed
Safari’s page rendering and response times were almost identical to Chrome to my experience. Sometimes it felt faster and sometimes it felt little bit slower than Chrome, but overall I did not feel any difference which is a good thing i guess. It doesn’t feel different.
One small thing though;
Safari sometimes freezes all of a sudden for 2-3 seconds. It was totally random for me, so i can’t really say if it was the cache files getting bigger or javascript engine locking up the UI. It has happened maybe around 10 times during the 2 weeks period. I guess it is worth mentioning.
Things I liked on Safari
- Built-in functionality to mute a specific tab or all of them without visiting each tab.
- Global share button that is integrated to OS applications.
- Simple design.
- Better (not perfect) history navigation with date sorting.
- Easiear access to some web-development related commands. (Empty/Disable Cache, Disable Javascript, etc.)
Conclusion
Before this experiment Google Chrome was my only browser.
At the end, I didn’t really went back to Chrome full-time. I am now using both browsers depending on what I am doing. Because I feel like Safari got some things right, and better than Chrome. But at the same time, there are a lot to improve on Safari’s side.
Let me know in comments if I missed something important to mention, or got it wrong or you totally had a different experience.
Cheers!