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“Why do you use Safari?”
I get that a lot whenever I share my screen on a Zoom call. And the people who ask that question fall into one of two camps.
One is the “Safari is bad for you” camp. The other consists of people who genuinely have no idea what Safari is.
I’ve even been told that by using Safari to manage my finances, I’m as good as offering open invitations for cybercriminals to empty my bank account.
Alas, I’ve been using Safari for at least the last ten years and it has been nothing but a fantastic web browser for both work and personal tasks.
So, I’m here today to defend Apple’s answer to Google Chrome. But I also need some help, because I want to get to the bottom of why people are so obsessed with Chrome.
Global browser market share
These figures tell their own story. If we look at the current market share for the most popular browsers, across the globe, it goes something like this:
- Chrome (64%)
- Safari (19%)
- Firefox (4%)
- Edge (3%)
- Samsung Internet (3%)
- Opera (2%)
Firstly, it’s lovely to see Firefox in that list. Despite its tiny market share, I have fond memories of that browser when it used to be my default choice many years ago.
No, I have no idea what ‘Samsung Internet’ is, either, but I assume it relates to whatever browser runs on their massive range of smartphones.
But the real battle clearly lies between Chrome and Safari. The former’s lead widens considerably when you dive into the desktop market share, with Chrome pushing up to 67% usage, versus Safari’s 10%. On mobile, Safari makes a four percentage point gain on top of its overall market share, but there’s still a colossal gap between the two.
Clearly, I’m in the minority. But I have reasons.
It’s (mainly) about battery life
Why any MacBook user would opt for Chrome as their main browser is simply beyond me.
Unless there’s a web app or website that demands Chrome (more on that later), there is simply no benefit to using Google’s web browser on a MacBook. In fact, it’s a painful user experience when you do.
This is for one very simple reason: battery life.
Chrome chomps away at a MacBook’s battery like no other app. It has been the bane of its existence on macOS for as long as I can remember and it’s clearly something Google has zero interest in addressing.
Why it’s so poor with memory management I have no idea. Some suggest that it’s more to do with Google’s insistence on working Chrome into every nook and cranny of the operating system, thus using up more system resources than it should.
All I know is that I dread opening Chrome on the few occasions I need to. It feels like a race against time if I want to preserve my battery life – even on the brilliant M1 platform.
Safari is plenty fast enough for me
The web is a complicated place. From my limited understanding, I’m aware that processing and rendering web pages and web apps are really taxing tasks for CPUs.
I guess this is why Apple always makes such a big deal about how much faster each iteration of Safari is. It’s a pissing contest, but one they’re clearly serious about winning.
If we’re to believe Avast’s research, Apple is doing a pretty good job of this, because Safari is actually one of the fastest browsers available, beating both Chrome and Firefox in speed tests.
Despite this, we’re likely at a point where any real speed gains between web browsers are marginal, given the increasingly impressive hardware they’re running on. But for me, Safari has always been lightning quick.
Yeah, the Apple ecosystem
I’ve noted previously that I’m welded deep within the Apple ecosystem, and I’ve always been happy to pay a premium for that experience.
Safari sits neatly within that ecosystem, enabling me to easily transfer the web pages I’m viewing between devices. But there are two elements of iCloud which have a huge impact on my ability to get things done.
The first is Keychain, which saves all of my website passwords and immediately syncs them across devices. Scoff all you like, and yes, Chrome does the same, but Apple’s version works for me and integrates nicely with their biometric security.
The second is Safari’s ability to call on my stored credit card details in Keychain (which I think is where they live). That also benefits from biometric security and effortless syncing.
Call me crazy, but I’d rather leave those details in a secure vault to which only I have access, rather than putting them anywhere near Google’s prying hands.
The problem with Safari
I don’t use Safari all of the time. I can’t.
The reason is simple: there are still a few web apps out there that don’t play nicely on Safari. Salesforce, for instance, is a pig on Safari, and some services like Zencastr don’t even run at all on Apple’s browser.
Then there are the web developers who clearly push Safari to the back of the pack when it comes to designing and testing new websites. I still come across far too many business websites which perform poorly or look dreadful on Safari. Fire them up in Chrome, and they’re perfect.
What gives?
I’m not a developer, therefore I can only make assumptions about what’s going on here. I guess the reason Safari is so often given such short shrift is that it doesn’t hold the greater market share. Perhaps it’s not a great platform to write for. I genuinely have no idea.
All I know is that it’s incredibly frustrating to have to switch to Chrome for certain tasks. As soon as I do that, I enter the horrible aforementioned world of unpredictable battery usage, and it is not a nice place to be.
What do you use?
This topic fascinates me. Are you in the Safari camp like me, or is Chrome your browser of choice?
They both have their place, but if you’re a Mac user (particularly of the MacBook variety), I just can’t fathom why you’d sacrifice battery life for Google’s web browser.
As always, get involved in the comments. Let’s thrash this out.
6 Comments
Well, I still use Firefox as I do not like Chrome and I do not have Apple equipment as it is so unfriendly when you have to use a range of different electronic equipment – let alone it is impossible to repair in many circumstances because of Apple’s disgusting approach to the right to repair. I have an iPad though as I needed the large screen but it has proved, as usual, a nightmare to integrate with other equipment, even a non-Air printer is trouble, so it remains a little island largely off by itself. I am not an Apple fan as you might have guessed.
In short: Extensions – There is one for nearly everything.
Reading your comment (and being annoyed about the memory consumption of Safari) I wanted to start a little experiment try Safari for one day. Ok, let’s get over all open tabs from Chrome to Safari. In Chrome I have a little extension, which allows me to copy all of the open tabs URLs into the clipboard. One click. I found a similar extension for Safari. “Tabs to URLs”. Hmm. I have to pay for it. On Chrome it had been free. Ok. It’s an experiment. Let’s buy it. The whole experience to go to the App Store and have to jump through 3 hoops to get it installed is… annoying. Then the bummer: I can’t open new tabs with all my nice URLs in the clipboard! 5€ burned! Damn. Ok. It was my fault. I did not check it’s working the other way round. I just expected it to work. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I found some hacks with Apple Script to make it work. But it’s a PITA. Chrome is just a much mightier tool than Safari. Sorry to say that.
I really would like to use Safari, as it is the only browser supporting color management. To see images on the web as the creator intended it would be nice. But there are too many other drawbacks.
In case you know a way to open several tabs at once from a list of URLs, I’ll give it a try. 😉
I even asked here to find a solution: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/419555/open-list-of-urls-in-your-clipboard-as-new-tabs-in-safari
Many don’t know that Chrome and Safari used to use the same web engine. Then Google went off on their own with Blink and Safari continued with WebKit. I just wish Safari continued its development with Windows instead they are basically just a Apple browser on Apple platforms. I think Safari would be more popular if it could be a cross platform browser. Then again, its like search engines where people become used to using one such as Google search and it just become habitual. Difficult to change people’s habits especially when most don’t see a problem that requires change. People use Chrome browser for similar reasons. They don’t see it as a problem so why switch? Sure people write all the time about the privacy issues but I think that’s over blown as a real concern for many users. If it was such a concern we would see more people switching away from Chrome and we don’t. Certainly there are plenty of good browsers that could replace Chrome that are more privacy oriented.
The reason developers target Chrome is twofold:
1. Chrome has the best developer console. Firefox keeps trying to catch up, but Google throws a ton of resources into their dev console to keep it the best. Safari’s is … functional.
2. It’s a pain to target Safari unless you develop on a Mac. And wouldn’t you know it? Most devs use Windows.
How do I know all this? I’m a developer.
Why do I dislike Chrome?
I could dive deeply into this, with dozens of examples, but I’ll just use one insurmountable problem with Chrome: capitalization and language-based automatic hyphenation.
First, Safari uses language dictionaries and the system language for automatic hyphenation hints. It does this well. For completeness across all Safari versions, I make sure I use “hyphens: auto; -webkit-hyphens: auto;” in either the .css file or the span/div tags. Also, Safari understands capitalization, y’know, exists. If I type “hyphen,” “Hyphen,” or I use “text-transform: capitalize;” to make the web browser render “hyphen” as “Hyphen,” Safari will break it into “hy-” (or “Hy-”) and “phen” when appropriate. If I don’t want to hyphenate something, I can use span/div to disable it.
With Firefox, I have to do a little more work, but not to the detriment of Safari. Firefox will NOT automatically hyphenate anything typed with a capital letter, but it WILL automatically hyphenate something capitalized via styling, i.e., “text-transform: capitalize;”
Armed with that knowledge, I can ensure I use “text-transform: capitalize;” to capitalize words in a document where I’ve enabled automatic hyphenation using “hyphens: auto; -webkit-hyphens: auto;”, and I have a very consistent experience across most web browsers.
Most.
Just not the Chromium engine (Edge, Chrome).
If a word contains any capital letter in Chrome, whether it was typed that way or transformed by style, it will not automatically hyphenate. A “recommended” workaround for this is to use “hyphenation hints” in words I want to hyphenate, i.e., the soft-hyphen () element. The problem with that: hyphenated words are no longer searchable, because, in the HTML, hyphenated words are no longer searchable.
When discussing this behavior (among others) on a web design forum, someone I’ll call a “Chrome addict” took a tortured route to state how WebKit (Safari, iOS, iPadOS, etc.) and Gecko (Firefox, Thunderbird, etc.) were probably doing “the right thing” while also saying they were still terrible for doing so and Chrome was “just better” and “won’t be changing anytime soon” to match “inferior browser behavior.”
So couple the technical complications with the addict attitude, and you have a product I really don’t care to accommodate or even use.
I just got off the phone with SiriusXM and they said because I have Safari rather than ***CHROME*** their steaming service will not work. What a bunch of unmitigated BS. I don’t trust Chrome, and I know it’s a memory/battery hog. We need to get on the bandwagon to get Apple to bust the “Chrome is Best” myth. Thanks for the article.