After years of faithful commitment to Safari, I've switched to Chrome, as I frequently keep over a hundred tabs open, and Safari 5.1 just couldn't keep up. All I can say is, I can't wait for Apple to get Safari fixed. Chrome is typical Google Garbage -- a flag planted to say they were there, with little concern for those who follow. For Safari users, there are numerous deal killers:
Opening a new tab can't take you to your preferred home page. Fortunately, there is a decent solution via extension:
New Tab Redirect!
Sets a user-specified URL to load in new tabs.
ID: icpgjfneehieebagbmdbhnlpiopdcmna
History is entirely illogically laid out. I just want a long, sequential, and complete history, as with Safari. Nothing more, and nothing less. Still haven't found history nirvana in Chrome. Another extension makes history minimally usable:
Recent History (Toolbar Icon)
This extension displays your recent history, recently closed tabs, most visited pages and recent bookmarks in a one click pop-up.
ID: milbdjfbgdilllphgdmlahonjodlfokh
Chrome doesn't provide the option for new tabs to open to the foreground. For real? Another extension:
Tabs to the front! - Version: 0.2.4
Brings newly created tabs to the foreground.
ID: hjaooagfdhdhmbfchnkhggjmacjlacla
Chrome pages up by 80% of the page, instead of by 100%, forcing you to skim through the last read paragraph to find the place where you left off. Annoying.
But, these aren't even the deal killlers.
Chrome doesn't permit the printing of background images of web pages, making many useless to print. This is scheduled to be resolved, but has been in discussion for years.
Chrome's intermittent status bar fails at its information function, is distracting, blocks page content, and is a security hole. Safari's always on or off status bar is a world better.
Chrome tabs sometimes freeze gracelessly. It is nice to have your other tabs continue to work, but often the frozen tab can't even be closed.
Chrome seems to have a thousand different preference pages, all of which are challenging to navigate, yet there are actually very few preference options available.
Even popular and well established extensions seem to freeze frequently, and often the failure of one seems to cascade across a few extensions. Attempts to relaunch crashed extensions frequently fails, as well.
Chrome uses plenty of memory. While there is no doubt that Chrome manages memory better than Safari 5.1, each open window takes up a good chunk of RAM. When added up, there is plenty getting used. Further, I experience a bouncing memory usage pattern, where every few seconds one window or another takes about 12-15% of the CPU. It has nothing to do with the loaded content in any on page. Watching individual page usage, I've closed the page that was hogging, only to discover that another page instantly becomes the new hog in town. Haven't been able to figure out what is happening during these frequent mini-peaks of processor activity.
Google is as bad as Apple at hearing customers' woes. In fact, Apple at least usually resolves issues in time, as the programmers want to make a more usable product. Google frequently never gets it right, thinking they know better than users what users want.
In summary, I can't wait for someone (maybe Apple?) to come out with a working Safari.
