4 ms·

Many reasons. Among those I care about: * It's a lot more power-efficient than any other browser. * In my experience, it's often faster than Chrome. * It fol

by eridius 10y ago

Many reasons. Among those I care about: * It's a lot more power-efficient than any other browser. * In my experience, it's often faster than Chrome. * It follows platform conventions. I still get weirded out by Chrome cramming everything into that ⋮ button. * It syncs history, favorites, and open tabs over iCloud to Safari on my phone. It also supports Handoff. * It's not made by Google, a company that I prefer to give as little personal information as possible to. And more generally, it's just more enjoyable to use.

petemill 10y ago
FYI chrome on macOS supports handoff too
- eridius 10y ago
  Huh, I didn't realize that. Of course, I rarely use Chrome (usually only when I need Flash, which is thankfully almost never). I assume when going iOS -> macOS it hands the URL to your default web browser?
  - leadingthenet 10y ago
    No, it only works between Chrome on Desktop and Chrome on iOS, and in my experience it's nowhere near as seamless as the one baked into Safari.
    - eridius 10y ago
      Apparently it actually works going from Desktop Chrome -> iOS Safari. I don't have Chrome installed on my iPhone, but if I have Chrome active on my desktop, Handoff will open the page in Safari.
    - netheril96 10y ago
      It works both ways.
  - cpmsmith 10y ago
    Unfortunately not, I believe because when handing off web links, you have to demonstrate to Apple that you own a domain to be allowed to link to it. What that practically means is if I'm on ycombinator.com, iOS won't let Chrome, a 3rd-party app, claim to be representative of any page on that domain without proof hosted on the domain. https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/Handoff/AdoptingHandoff/AdoptingHandoff.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40014338-CH2-SW10 https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Us...
JasonSage 10y ago
An FYI regarding "In my experience, it's often faster than Chrome"... I found during development that Safari will start retrieving suggested URLs even before you finish typing them, so if I'm going to 'news.ycombinator.com', it makes the request when I hit 'n', and by the time I hit a few more characters and enter a few hundred milliseconds later, the request is already complete.
- Klathmon 10y ago
  Chrome has been doing that for a long time and more. If you hunt around you'll find that chrome is even doing things like speculative DNS queries, opening TCP channels to endpoints that are often opened on pages that you might be trying to load, in some very limited cases even pre-downloading and executing a page "hidden" only to swap it in like you changed tabs once you "hit enter". [0][1] If you tend to be pretty "habitual" when using chrome, fire up something like wireshark before opening it and watch what it does when you first start it. A year or 2 ago I did this and noticed it would instantly fire off DNS queries for gmail and start a TCP channel before i've even typed anything! (as at the time the first thing i'd do when opening chrome was check my email). It's really cool shit, and I'm sure chrome and safari aren't the only ones doing it. I mean the gains can be substantial (especially for mobile devices! getting the DNS query and TCP handshake out of the way on a shitty 3g network before the user stops typing means it will load a few hundred ms sooner) and for many of the smaller changes there are very few downsides. [0] This goes over the bit ones that many browsers have: https://css-tricks.com/prefetching-preloading-prebrowsing/ https://css-tricks.com/prefetching-preloading-prebrowsing/ [1] Here is a somewhat-technical article about chrome from 2012 that goes over the DNS and TCP-preconnect stuff: https://www.igvita.com/2012/06/04/chrome-networking-dns-prefetch-and-tcp-preconnect/ https://www.igvita.com/2012/06/04/chrome-networking-dns-pref...
  - JasonSage 10y ago
    I don't know why, but when using a local development server only Safari manages to generate requests while typing the URL for me—Chrome does not. It's possible I've put more work into my Chrome privacy settings.
ino 10y ago
Good list, let me add bad color display. Chrome shows wrong, washed out or desaturated colors everywhere (not just embedded images without color profiles or wrong gamma, but css hex colors), it's a big difference from Safari, Firefox and specially from browsers on Windows machines and phones.
cmod 10y ago
And on the typography front: * Properly hyphenates
- chipotle_coyote 10y ago
  I've been (mildly) irritated for years that Chrome's devs have taken so long to put in CSS hyphenation support; this has been supported in other browsers since ~2012. It looks like it's finally got partial support since Chrome 55, although caniuse.com says it's still Mac-only. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=605840 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=605840

by eridius 10y ago

petemill 10y ago

FYI chrome on macOS supports handoff too

eridius 10y ago
Huh, I didn't realize that. Of course, I rarely use Chrome (usually only when I need Flash, which is thankfully almost never). I assume when going iOS -> macOS it hands the URL to your default web browser?
- leadingthenet 10y ago
  No, it only works between Chrome on Desktop and Chrome on iOS, and in my experience it's nowhere near as seamless as the one baked into Safari.
  - eridius 10y ago
    Apparently it actually works going from Desktop Chrome -> iOS Safari. I don't have Chrome installed on my iPhone, but if I have Chrome active on my desktop, Handoff will open the page in Safari.
  - netheril96 10y ago
    It works both ways.
- cpmsmith 10y ago
  Unfortunately not, I believe because when handing off web links, you have to demonstrate to Apple that you own a domain to be allowed to link to it. What that practically means is if I'm on ycombinator.com, iOS won't let Chrome, a 3rd-party app, claim to be representative of any page on that domain without proof hosted on the domain. https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/Handoff/AdoptingHandoff/AdoptingHandoff.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40014338-CH2-SW10 https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Us...

JasonSage 10y ago

An FYI regarding "In my experience, it's often faster than Chrome"... I found during development that Safari will start retrieving suggested URLs even before you finish typing them, so if I'm going to 'news.ycombinator.com', it makes the request when I hit 'n', and by the time I hit a few more characters and enter a few hundred milliseconds later, the request is already complete.

Klathmon 10y ago
Chrome has been doing that for a long time and more. If you hunt around you'll find that chrome is even doing things like speculative DNS queries, opening TCP channels to endpoints that are often opened on pages that you might be trying to load, in some very limited cases even pre-downloading and executing a page "hidden" only to swap it in like you changed tabs once you "hit enter". [0][1] If you tend to be pretty "habitual" when using chrome, fire up something like wireshark before opening it and watch what it does when you first start it. A year or 2 ago I did this and noticed it would instantly fire off DNS queries for gmail and start a TCP channel before i've even typed anything! (as at the time the first thing i'd do when opening chrome was check my email). It's really cool shit, and I'm sure chrome and safari aren't the only ones doing it. I mean the gains can be substantial (especially for mobile devices! getting the DNS query and TCP handshake out of the way on a shitty 3g network before the user stops typing means it will load a few hundred ms sooner) and for many of the smaller changes there are very few downsides. [0] This goes over the bit ones that many browsers have: https://css-tricks.com/prefetching-preloading-prebrowsing/ https://css-tricks.com/prefetching-preloading-prebrowsing/ [1] Here is a somewhat-technical article about chrome from 2012 that goes over the DNS and TCP-preconnect stuff: https://www.igvita.com/2012/06/04/chrome-networking-dns-prefetch-and-tcp-preconnect/ https://www.igvita.com/2012/06/04/chrome-networking-dns-pref...
- JasonSage 10y ago
  I don't know why, but when using a local development server only Safari manages to generate requests while typing the URL for me—Chrome does not. It's possible I've put more work into my Chrome privacy settings.

ino 10y ago

Good list, let me add bad color display. Chrome shows wrong, washed out or desaturated colors everywhere (not just embedded images without color profiles or wrong gamma, but css hex colors), it's a big difference from Safari, Firefox and specially from browsers on Windows machines and phones.

cmod 10y ago

And on the typography front: * Properly hyphenates

chipotle_coyote 10y ago
I've been (mildly) irritated for years that Chrome's devs have taken so long to put in CSS hyphenation support; this has been supported in other browsers since ~2012. It looks like it's finally got partial support since Chrome 55, although caniuse.com says it's still Mac-only. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=605840 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=605840