Battle of the B(r)owsers (original graphic)
Much of the hype from WWDC 2009 revolved around iPhone 3G S and Macbook Pro. One aspect of the conference that seemed to fly under the radar of popularity is the release of Safari 4.0 for Mac and Windows. The last time I gave Safari a try to be my default browser, it was going up against my long-time use of Firefox 2.x. As I remember, Safari lost the match. As of today, some time has passed and Google’s Chrome browser has overthrown my love for Firefox. This is the new standard Safari has to live up to in my opinion, anyway.
When I initially launched Safari 4.0, it took a little time to start up – but that’s to be expected. From there on afterwards though, Safari had pretty similar startup rates to Chrome. In fact, the appearance of the Safari browser is so close to that of Chrome. Although I am not all too sure, I think Chrome copied Safari rather than vice versa.
Safari goods when contrasted with Chrome:
- Equally snappy webpage loading
- RSS
- SnapBack
- Top Sites grid-style graphic interface
- Very sleek and smooth
- Notifies you if one of your top sites has updated with new content since you last visited
- Smooth transitions
- More to come…
Safari bads when contrasted with Chrome
- Address bar doesn’t forward to search engine
- In other words, when you enter search terms in the address bar, it assumes you are searching for an exact domain, thus you receive a “server not found” error
- No tab button
- Opening a new tab shifts position of your webpage up or down
- Loading webpages lag out more than they do in Chrome
Final Thoughts
Safari is pretty neat – it has some fundamental features that are absent in Chrome. However, it’ll take more from Apple to make Safari stand out from the crowd. At this time, it seems that they are just meeting benchmarks, rather than exceling beyond standards.
