Listen: I know you love your Google Chrome. You’ve got your massive collection of extensions, your favorite pinned tabs, and there’s even that colorful theme you added sometime in 2013.
You’re comfy in Chrome. I was too, and thought Safari was a stripped-down, no-features excuse for a browser. But then I tried it. And at some point between then and now, Safari got good.
Google Chrome, then, is by far the most used browser, accounting for well over half of web traffic, followed by Safari in a distant second place.
I’m not saying it’s the browser for everyone, but I will say that every Mac user should at least give Safari a try, because it does a lot of things better than Chrome (or any other browser, for that matter). Here are a few. Better Battery Life, and Better Performance on Older Macs Browsers can be optimized for efficiency or for speed—it’s hard to really do both.
Chrome, for the most part, focuses on speed; Safari focuses on efficiency. It’s understandable if you’d rather have a faster web browsing experience: that’s all some users care about. But there are some very good reasons to focus on efficiency. RELATED: Power usage is the most obvious one., Chrome beats Safari when it comes to benchmarks, but Safari does way better in terms of battery life. If you’re using a MacBook, replacing Chrome with Safari can improve your battery life, in some cases by a couple of hours.
You don’t have to take my word for it: and Chrome will always top the list, unless you’re converting video or something. Chrome rides your CPU hard, and while it is getting better about battery life, it’s still no match for Safari.
And if you’re using an older Mac, Safari might actually perform better for you. On my 2011 MacBook Pro, starting up Chrome is a surefire way to trigger the fans and slow down the rest of my system.
Switching to Safari, for me, makes every other program on my device a little faster. And yes: I could upgrade my laptop. That’s absolutely a fair thing to say. But when I use Safari, I don’t feel like I have to. Are Chrome’s features worth $1000 or more to you? Content Filters Are Better Than Ad Blockers If you’re a longtime Chrome user, you probably turn to something like or to stop ads from mucking up your browser.
And while there’s nothing wrong with either of those options, they do have a downside. Due to the way Chrome works, they look at sites after they’re downloaded, and retroactively remove the blocked content. That slows you down, and uses resources. Safari is different. Apple offers a content blocking API, which extension makers can use to prevent ads from ever being downloaded in the first place.
As: Content-blocking rules are created in a structured format ahead-of-time, declaratively, rather than running extension-provided code at the moment a decision about blocking needs to be made. WebKit compiles the ruleset into a bytecode format that it can process efficiently at runtime, reducing latency between when a page request is created and when it is dispatched over the network. Safari does not request undesired content. By avoiding unnecessary or unwanted downloads, Safari uses less memory and has better performance.
If this sounds like nonsense to you, and compare it to your Google Chrome setup. I bet you’ll be surprised what a difference this makes, both in terms of performance and battery life. There’s no reason Chrome couldn’t offer a content blocking API. But don’t hold your breath for Google, the biggest advertising company in the world, to prioritize that. Reader Mode Makes Every Site Better Even if you don’t use ad blockers for moral reasons, some websites glut of ads and terrible typographic choices make reading a chore.
Safari offers a built-in way to deal with this: Reader Mode. Click one button and the text of the article you’re reading is extracted and put on a clean slate. This makes reading a lot more pleasant. And while there are alternatives to this for Chrome, they all come as browser extensions or bookmarklets, and none work very quickly or seamlessly, at least in my experience.
Every time I try to quit Safari, Reader Mode is what pulls me back in. Safari Syncs With Your iPhone and iPad If you’re an iPhone or iPad user, it’s hard to match the integration between Safari on your Mac and Safari on your iOS device. Your tabs and bookmarks sync seamlessly,. Passwords saved on one device are accessible on another. We could go on.
Chrome does this as well, but you have to use Chrome on your iPhone too—but Safari is the default browser in iOS, with no way to change it. So Chrome’s syncing won’t be nearly as seamless, since some apps will send you to Safari when you click on links. Put simply, if you’re an iPhone user, using Safari makes your life a lot easier. Chrome Does Some Things Better, But Not Everything We could not have written this article five years ago. A lot of these features are new-ish, and Safari’s extensions ecosystem was so terrible for so long that everyone jumped ship for Chrome, which is the main reason so many Mac users are still there.
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And to this day, if you love extensions, you’ve got a lot more choice on Chrome. That’s just how it is. Chrome does a lot of other things well, including performance and integration with Google’s ecosystem. But Safari in 2017 has a lot of strengths, and if you’ve been ignoring it you should check it out.
You might be surprised.
Is based on, an open-source browser project. Anyone can take the Chromium source code and use it to build their own browser, renaming it and changing whatever they like. That’s why there are so many alternative browsers based on Google Chrome—but you don’t necessarily want to use most of them. Many web sites have recommended these browsers in the past—including us, in this very post. We’ve since rewritten this article to discuss the problems with some of these alternative browsers, and why we no longer recommend using them—with a few exceptions.
The “Secure” Comodo Dragon Had Big Security Problems is a Chrome-based browser made by Comodo, a security company. It’s installed by default with Comodo Internet Security. You’d think a “secure” web browser made by a security software company would bewell, secure, but it’s had some big problems. Google’s Tavis Ormandy found that the browser that destroyed the security of. As he put it: “Chromodo is described as ‘highest levels of speed, security and privacy’, but actually disables all web security.” Comodo responded by issuing a fix that didn’t actually fix the problem.
Comodo did fix it eventually, but that doesn’t change the fact that such a glaring security problem shipped with the browser. Companies like Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, and Apple have never made such a big mistake in their products. Comodo doesn’t sound like a company we’d want to get our web browser from. SRWare Iron’s Privacy Claims Are Exaggerated, and It’s Slow to Update SRWare Iron promises to remove various privacy-infringing options from Google Chrome. But it isn’t as good as it sounds.
Right off the bat, there’s something we don’t like: On March 17, 2017, the latest version of SRWare Iron was version 56.0.2950.1. The latest version of Chrome was version 57.0.2987.110, released on March 16. That means SRWare Iron was missing more than 36 security fixes that Chrome had for over a week. That’s because SRWare Iron’s developers have to do some work to release those security fixes whenever Google releases a new version of Chrome. It’s not instant, and these third-party projects may take a long time to issue updates if their developers are busy. RELATED: But here’s the real kicker: you aren’t really getting any extra privacy out of SRWare Iron.
Most of what SRWare Iron does is possible through Chrome’s regular privacy settings. And if you enable those tweaks in Chrome, you’ll get the latest security updates without waiting for and trusting another company. Chromium Isn’t For Users (Except on Linux) Google doesn’t want you using the open-source Chromium browser. That’s why only offers “raw builds” of Chromium code that “may be tremendously buggy” for Windows. They also don’t include an auto-update feature, so you have to manually download new versions with security and bug fixes.
These Chromium builds are really just development tools for checking whether issues are fixed in the latest Chromium code. RELATED:, while Google Chrome includes a few closed-source pieces (like Flash). That’s why Chromium is often made available via on Linux distributions. A Chromium browser obtained from your Linux package repositories should be safe and receive regular security updates from your Linux distribution.
But Windows and Mac users should just install Chrome. The Chrome-Based Browsers Worth Using: Opera, Vivaldi, and Chrome Portable There are, of course, exceptions to every rule.
Some browsers are solid alternatives to Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and Internet Explorer., for example, has been around in one form or another for a long time, with the first version of Opera being released back in 1995. In 2013, the company abandoned its old, homegrown browser engine, Presto, and Opera is now based on Chromium. But Opera isn’t just a Chrome clone—it’s a unique browser with its own unique features, like a built-in VPN that can secure your web browsing. RELATED: is also based on Chromium, and was created by former Opera developers who disagree with Opera’s new direction.
Released in 2016, Vivaldi attempts to restore the Opera project has removed. For example, Vivaldi allows you to make your tabs appear as vertical thumbnails, something that just isn’t possible in Chrome. The developers are working on adding a built-in email client, a feature no longer included on the latest versions of Opera. Both Opera and Vivaldi support Chrome extensions, as they’re based on the same underlying technology. If you’re looking for a new browser that still uses Chrome’s speedy rendering engine and supports the same browser extensions you use in Chrome, these browsers are interesting options you may want to try. RELATED: Lastly, you may also consider a portable version of Chrome or Chromium.
The project, for example, is a customized build of Chromium designed to run as a ““. If you place its files on a USB drive or other removable media device, you can take it between computers, using it on any PC without installing it first. That said, Chromium Portable is based on the unstable, which means it’s more unstable than the typical stable versions of Google Chrome. You probably aren’t looking for that.
If you’d prefer a stable, portable version of Google Chrome, you’ll probably want to use the. Either way, both are decent, secure versions of Chrome. Why Lesser-Known Browsers Are Suspect There are other Chromium-based browsers out there. But we’re skeptical of them, and you should be too.
Here’s the issue: Browsers are very important programs. You spend almost all of your internet-connected time in a browser, so it needs to be secure. Part of that means getting security updates very quickly when they’re released, and smaller Chromium-based browsers don’t always do that. Furthermore, you’re trusting a small company or group of developers to make changes to your browser, which can introduce problems—intentional or not. Comodo’s security problems and SRWare’s update delays are a few examples of the problems that can occur, even when a browser developer is acting in good faith.
And if a browser developer isn’t acting in good faith, you’re in an even worse position: they could snoop on your web browsing and abuse its access to your computer. Even if you don’t trust Google, Google is a large company with a lot of eyes on it. Google won’t steal your credit card number. If Google does something bad or makes a big mistake in Chrome, everyone will hear about it. The same isn’t true for these Chromium alternatives.
Many of the features promised in various third-party browsers can be achieved simply by tweaking Chrome’s settings or installing extensions from the. You’re better off using Google Chrome and installing a few browser extensions than switching to a Chrome-based alternative.
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