

Google Chrome more popular than Safari - richardburton
http://gizmodo.com/5426989/chrome-beats-safari

======
symesc
I've been a Mactard for years and a big fan of Safari, but Chrome has become
my default browser on my Mac.

Chrome became the default on my PC at work as soon as I could get it installed
a year ago.

The beauty of Chrome is its speed and elegance. Omnibox for searches, the
behaviour of tabs (remembering which tab spawned the subsequent one), and the
ability to use icons only for the bookmarks bar are three things that Safari
doesn't do.

The addition of extensions for the PC have cemented its position there, and
when those services are added to the Mac version life gets better.

Firefox does most of this, of course, but it looks and feels bloated and old
on both platforms.

I will forever love Firefox for freeing us from Microsoft's IE tyranny, but
Chrome is truly firing on all 8 cylinders these days, pun intended.

~~~
vaporstun
I've tried using Chrome as my default browser on Mac many times, but always
end up going back to Safari. Chrome just isn't ready yet.

It has no bookmark manager, so when you have more bookmarks than space on the
toolbar, there is literally no way to move them around short of deleting
enough so that they all fit on the toolbar then moving them around. I ran into
this when I wanted to add a new one to my toolbar and it was not possible.
There is no way to rearrange them in the menu.

The scrolling in Chrome annoys me by being all herky jerky.

Lack of bookmark synching in Chrome is annoying. I have a desktop at work and
a laptop for home use and it's so nice having my bookmarks sync up with Safari
without any intervention.

Chrome on Mac is the first browser I've used where if I scroll down a page, go
to a link on that page, then hit my back button it doesn't go back to where I
was before. I have to scroll down the page again manually.

I'm a 1Password user and they do not have a version of their plugin that works
for Chrome.

Chrome also does not make use of the standard OS X Keychain. So I have to put
all of my passwords in again manually. Huge pain.

Some of these things can supposedly be remedied by using the latest version of
Chromium which has extensions enabled and installing random extensions, but
that is a workaround for a browser that's not ready yet.

Until it is possible to rearrange my bookmarks, sync them, use 1Password,
scroll smoothly, and not have to scroll every time I hit the back button, I'll
stick with Safari. Chrome has great potential, but is still not to the point
where it can serve as a valid replacement for me. When I'm using Windows, it's
my default for sure, but on Mac Chrome isn't ready yet.

~~~
mikepurvis
"The scrolling in Chrome annoys me by being all herky jerky."

Call me shallow, but that's the biggest blocker for me.

~~~
unalone
Shallow? Not at all. It's an irritating visual disruption that you see every
time you interact with a web page. Those small things make the most enormous
difference.

------
3pt14159
Market share doesn't matter. What matters is person-hours of internet usage.
Chrome users are on the internet for hours every day. It's part of their job.
IE users are on the computer maybe once a day at the end of the day to check
their Hotmail accounts. Since I'm online much more, I'm worth much more to
Google, because as I search in the address bar I come across many Google ads
from my Google search results. Some of which I click on.

~~~
PanMan
But you might be way less likely to click on ads, because you had more
training in ignoring them, than those IE users.

~~~
protothomas
By that reasoning alone though IE users would be more valuable to Google than
Chrome users. I think ultimately it boils down to controlling the user's means
of access, probably with more long-term aims in mind, in which case it could
be argued that it is raw market share that matters after all.

------
jonknee
Chrome is the new FireFox--the quickly moving upstart. A great thing as
FireFox is quickly losing its shine.

~~~
swannodette
Honestly I hope Chrome is the _new IE_. If it chips away at Safari or Firefox
marketshare, that's no win for anyone- those are already damn good browsers.

Personally, thus far, I've yet to see anything in Chrome that would make me
jump ship (and I've been trying it for a while). I can do serious development
with Firefox and I can have minimalist browsing with Safari.

~~~
pavs
The only reason I switched from Firefox because its a memory hog, the longer
you use it the slower it gets and eventually crashes - If it was once in a
while I could live with that but it happens too frequently. Also installing
extensions on Firefox can effect the browser performance, so the more
extensions you use more often your browser will crash and slower it will get.
Every time there is a extension upgrade you need to go through 2-3 steps and
restart browser to install them.

With Chrome, I have 23 extensions installed at the moment, it performs as good
as having no extension installed. I can't even imagine having 23 extensions on
Firefox. All the extensions updates are done on the back ground, install it
and forget about it. I had some browser crashes on the early chrome builds but
since the last 8 months I didnt have a single browser crash and I am using dev
channel.

IMO chrome is head over heels better than Firefox (this coming from a former
Firefox fan boy) and you need to use it more than 5 minutes to really
appreciate it.

------
slig
I can't see why anyone would stick with safari giving that Chrome runs the
same rendering engine, a faster JS engine and extensions.

~~~
ugh
Scrolling is broken. The difference is minimal, but Chrome doesn't scroll the
same as native OS X apps. It's the same with Firefox (only worse).

I scroll all the time. So it should better work perfectly. With Chrome, it
doesn't. Switching between my feedreader and Chrome made my fingers hurt.

(This is, by the way, something many OS X apps get wrong. All of MS Office,
iTunes and so on.)

~~~
nailer
What's the prob specifically? That the speed is different?

~~~
ugh
It scrolls faster, yes.

------
mahmud
It doesn't hurt that Google has been pushing chrome via ads like crack.

~~~
kingkawn
or that its faster than all other browsers in my experience.

~~~
mahmud
Which one is the bigger population that can statically accommodate this
growth? the set of people who consciously shop for browsers with faster
Javascript VMs and faster startup times, or the set of people who click on
Google ads? Specially authoritative looking ones?

Let's be real.

~~~
krakensden
It's not like the performance increase is subtle.

The five buttons you have to click, each saying 'I acknowledge that this
software may set my computer on fire' before you can even run an installer on
windows has really cut down on program installation by the unwashed masses- in
short, I think you are wrong.

~~~
mahmud
You are forgetting what people had to cope with before. The new security
popups are nothing compared to the abuse shareware has heaped on users.

If the security warnings are discouraging people from installing new software,
they would equally discourage Chrome and Safari installation. So this is not
an issue.

When it comes to web users, I lean towards them being "naive". You are free to
hold a positive impression of the world as benchmarking enthusiasts :-)

~~~
pavs
For some reason you get no security warning when installing chrome on vista or
windows 7. I have done this in several windows 7 machines, no popups no
nothing, just accept terms and click install and chrome is installed. Can
anyone else verify this? I am using dev builds, if that makes any difference.

~~~
nanexcool
That's because it only installs for the current user, not everyone on your
machine. The exe is located in
C:\Users\\[User]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe

~~~
Shorel
I actually hate that behaviour, specially as the family computer does have
several user accounts.

~~~
pavs
takes less than 1 minute to install...

------
rajat
I've switched to Chrome primarily because my MB Pro is a little short of
memory (should upgrade soon), and Chrome seems to use a lot less real memory
(as reported by activity manager) than Safari does. Safari seems to get upto
300 Mbytes pretty quickly, while Chrome stays around 60 Mbytes. My personal
experience is that that seems to keep the system from bogging down
periodically. Once I upgrade the memory, we'll see.

One potential problem for Chrome, at least for the type of users we see here,
is any potential issue with adblockers. Wasn't there some news items about
Google possibly being less than thrilled with such extensions
(understandably)? I know quite a few people for whom a good adblocking
solution is essential, and they stick with Firefox exclusively.

------
tcskeptic
The single feature preventing me from using Safari on Windows as my default
browser is an option to open new tabs instead of new windows without some sort
of "special" click. My annoyance lvel over this missing feature is becoming
unreasonable.

~~~
blehn
the following terminal command will change Safari's default behavior to open
all "new window" links in new tabs

    
    
       defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true
    

EDIT: as slig kindly pointed out, this tip won't help Windows users.

~~~
slig
Nice tip, but he says that the problem is on Windows.

~~~
panic
You could email the Safari preferences file to somebody with a Mac and have
them run the command.

------
socratees
Given the rate at which Chrome is revolutionizing browser related
technologies, I even think Chrome might overtake Firefox in market share very
shortly.

~~~
electromagnetic
Chrome's market share is a considerable jump to say it was released little
over a year ago. I never saw this kind of growth for Firefox until the paid
ads started appearing everywhere.

Chrome has attained in its first year the same average market growth of
Firefox (roughly 4.5%) that it attained in 5 years with paid referral programs
and advertisements everywhere. I wonder what growth Chrome will attain when it
hits the rapid phase of its growth.

Also to consider is Microsoft is shipping Windows 7 in Europe with IE,
Firefox, Chrome and another IIRC.

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fauigerzigerk
I'm staying with Firefox for the time being even though Chrome maximises
screen real estate and scrolls better (larger increments). The reason is the
Tab Hunter extension.

One of the biggest issues I have is finding my tabs, and Tab Hunter is ideal
for that purpose.

------
bradbeattie
Either way, it's a win for WebKit.

~~~
city41
Which was made what it is today with heavy contributions from Apple. Man,
that's gotta sting a little bit :)

------
Pistos2
Chrome just doesn't do it for me [yet]. I'm sticking with Opera for the
foreseeable future. For me, "great speed + few features" doesn't beat
"adequate speed + great features".

------
sailormoon
Great! I like how safari looks but Apple's refusal to allow third party
extensions has always soured me on the program and meant I never really
seriously adopted it over FF. I just cannot live without ABP.

Chrome's a great browser and with the extensions has become the best browser
on Windows IMO. Mac doesn't support extensions yet but they are presumably
coming, and when they do it'll be the best browser on Mac, too, unless FF
pulls something out of their hat ..

~~~
cstejerean
What do you mean by 'Apple's refusal to allow third party extensions'? For
example, I'm using Click to Flash for in Safari at the moment.

~~~
panic
Click to Flash isn't really an extension. Your browser sees it, like Flash, as
a plug-in that can handle certain content. But instead of actually presenting
that content, it draws a gradient and some text until you click on it (at
which point it hands control off to the actual Flash plug-in).

Real browser extensions allow you to do a lot more than this.

