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Maybe because anyone who has used Safari knows that WebKit2's multiprocess architecture is worse in practice. As a full-time Safari user I can tell you that thi

Maybe because anyone who has used Safari knows that WebKit2's multiprocess architecture is worse in practice. As a full-time Safari user I can tell you that things have gotten markedly worse since it went multiprocess. Pages go white momentarily (not crash) all the time, and on top of that they also crash all the time. Additionally, I believe that unlike Chrome, Safari has ONE separate process for all the tabs, and the render process (whereas Chrome tries one-process per tab -- way better in my opinion). Just out of curiosity, why do you think WebKit2 is the "standard"? Just because they named it "WebKit2"? Had Google named their multi-process version "WebKitB" would it be equally standard? It certainly came FIRST (I think it took WebKit2 years before it had an answer). I think this is a success of open source. Was the creation of WebKit a failure of Mozilla open source? Of course not. Sometimes you need to just actually test two ideas instead of discussing them. EDIT: Upon further inspection, I think current Safari isn't even using WebKit2. The wiki still says it should be considered a "technology demo", and exists largely in parallel to WebKit. So whatever multi-process thing its doing now I guess is separate? It's not clear to me. EDIT 2: I guess it is using WebKit2, so my criticisms stand.

kevincennis 14y ago
Sincerely curious: why are you still a full-time Safari user in light of all those complaints?
- tolmasky 14y ago
  Like most things, habit probably. Also, I used to work a lot on Safari/WebKit, so I guess sentimental value? That being said, I do like the way Safari "feels" a lot more than Chrome. I think Chrome is actually quite ugly, and bad from a UI perspective. For example, Safari's overflow tab menu is a much nicer solution than Chrome's insistence on shrinking tabs ever smaller until you can't tell them apart at all. Additionally Chrome is missing a killer feature I use all the time: zoom, and more specifically, double tap to zoom. I find it hard to read a lot of text on websites, and double tap, centered, zoom, is amazing. Its too bad everything else feels like its gotten way worse in the last 5 or so years.
  - kbenson 14y ago
    Just in that specific, or also zoom in general? Chrome has had zoom for as long as I can remember, and that's years. Double click to zoom seems like something that shouldn't be too hard to do in an extension.
    - tolmasky 14y ago
      I meant "smooth zoom" I guess? I can pinch in from anywhere on the page and center in on any particular item at any particular zoom level. Unless I've missed something, Chrome seems to have "integral" stepwise zooming, which also always zooms from the center of the page (vs where my mouse cursor is). It ends up feeling like Safari's old zoom which would just make the individual items bigger (as opposed to actually scaling the page), but I'm pretty sure Chrome is indeed scaling the page, just doing it in a way that I find frustrating and less useful. Another example, I'm watching an embedded YouTube video which thus annoyingly doesn't allow fullscreen, so I double tap it, and it fills the browser window, and it seems to be smart enough to render at correct resolution at that scale (since it still allows you to choose a higher resolution even though it won't full screen). To do similar feats with Chrome I have to manually jigger things around.
  - malandrew 14y ago
    The tab behavior in chrome is what does it for me too. In fact, you can have so many tabs that you can no longer open the last tabs (the tabs extend past the little full screen or switch user icon). I also think Safari has a much better solution for handling bookmarking when you have multiple tabs. Solve these two issues and I'd switch to Chrome in a second.
    - lallysingh 14y ago
      Check out the Chrome Web Store. There are several tab management extensions. One's a quick tab list with a search box.
    - levifig 14y ago
      I actually prefer Firefox's approach to multiple tabs: the tab bar scrolls (you can use the scroll wheel). That's about the only thing I like in Firefox anymore though… Been using Chrome because of its multi-user support (tied in with Google accounts) but Safari is soooo much better than Chrome in terms of UI and UX… Latest Chrome betas, with the full integration of the address bar as a full-blown "Google box" (e.g. you start typing, it loads Google Instant Search without the page's classic search box)… I digress… :)
- Camillo 14y ago
  I can confirm what tolmasky said about WebKit2, yet I'm also a Safari user. The interface just feels better for me, and Chrome has actually been getting worse in this respect. When I stopped using it, a few versions ago, it had started feeling more and more like a Chrome OS VM than like a browser on my Mac. I doubt they've changed course since then.
- kalleboo 14y ago
  Safari is the only browser that has decent scrolling performance on a Retina MacBook. All the other browsers stutter really badly as soon as the page has any complexity with fixed elements (Facebook is a big one)
  - kevincennis 14y ago
    Yeah, that's certainly true. Pretty frustrating to have spent $2,500 or whatever it was on my retina MBP and I can't smoothly scroll websites with more than like 500 DOM nodes in Chrome.
  - smackfu 14y ago
    That's a case where Apple has to optimize the heck out of Safari until it is workable on that particular new machine, otherwise it would get terrible reviews and hurt the overall brand. Chrome doesn't have the same incentives to get that particular machine working well, especially since the next revision of the Retina Macbook probably won't even need special handling since it will surely have a more powerful GPU. They can just wait it out, similar to what happened with the iPad 3 vs iPad 4, where people had to optimize for the iPad 3 and then those optimizations were unneeded on the iPad 4.
    - lloeki 14y ago
      > That's a case where Apple has to optimize the heck out of Safari until it is workable Actually, they "merely" leverage their platform by using CoreAnimation, making it GPU accelerated (and enabling pinch-to-zoom), while Chrome scrolling hits the CPU really hard.
  - saebekassebil 14y ago
    So true, this is actually one of the things that almost convinced me to switch to Safari. I'd miss the Developer Tools though..
    - Camillo 14y ago
      But the developer tools are in Safari.
- workbench 14y ago
  Interface is nicer and more native. Chrome is even starting to drop native dialog boxes
- samclearman 14y ago
  No way to disable tabs (in particular the default "open in new tab" behavior) in Chrome.
mikewest 14y ago
Safari is using WebKit2, and has been for some time. The "preproduction prototype" bit of that Wiki is a bit out of date.
macrael 14y ago
Wikipedia says WebKit2 has been part of Safari since Safari 5.1 which I believe was released with Lion, or so. So it absolutely is in production. The major difference here being that WebKit2 is part of the webkit project, so as the rendering engine (which sits atop both webkit1 and webkit2) is improved by all the various parties involved in WebKit's development, it gets better for everyone. Google's fork now means that changes to the rendering engine they make to Blink will no longer have any effect on the WebKit project, which does seem to be a major difference. I don't know all the history here, but my understanding is that Chrome's engine was never offered in that same sort of way. It was just part of the chromium project, apparently a part that increased the difficulty of integrating with WebKit, not an api intended to be taken by others and integrated into their browser.
- coldtea 14y ago
  >The major difference here being that WebKit2 is part of the webkit project, so as the rendering engine (which sits atop both webkit1 and webkit2) is improved by all the various parties involved in WebKit's development, it gets better for everyone. That's in theory. In practice nobody bothered besides Apple.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - LeonidasXIV 14y ago
    The recently released Epiphany 3.8 (part of GNOME 3.8) uses WebKit2, so there are others who care.
- dragonwriter 14y ago
  > The major difference here being that WebKit2 is part of the webkit project, so as the rendering engine (which sits atop both webkit1 and webkit2) is improved by all the various parties involved in WebKit's development, it gets better for everyone. Google's fork now means that changes to the rendering engine they make to Blink will no longer have any effect on the WebKit project, which does seem to be a major difference. It also means that the work they do on the rendering engine for Blink won't be constrained by the constraints imposed by support the various WebKit implementations.
mtgx 14y ago
You're assuming it's the exact same multi-process architecture. Is it, really?
othermaciej 14y ago
You're right that Chrome's multiprocess architecture is more mature than the WebKit2 design. I wish we hadn't ended up in a position where we felt we had to make our own. But stay tuned - we have some great stuff coming up.
easytiger 14y ago
all of this all the more hilarious because the current version of Safari is functionally broken to the point where it is unusable
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

kevincennis 14y ago

Sincerely curious: why are you still a full-time Safari user in light of all those complaints?

tolmasky 14y ago
Like most things, habit probably. Also, I used to work a lot on Safari/WebKit, so I guess sentimental value? That being said, I do like the way Safari "feels" a lot more than Chrome. I think Chrome is actually quite ugly, and bad from a UI perspective. For example, Safari's overflow tab menu is a much nicer solution than Chrome's insistence on shrinking tabs ever smaller until you can't tell them apart at all. Additionally Chrome is missing a killer feature I use all the time: zoom, and more specifically, double tap to zoom. I find it hard to read a lot of text on websites, and double tap, centered, zoom, is amazing. Its too bad everything else feels like its gotten way worse in the last 5 or so years.
- kbenson 14y ago
  Just in that specific, or also zoom in general? Chrome has had zoom for as long as I can remember, and that's years. Double click to zoom seems like something that shouldn't be too hard to do in an extension.
  - tolmasky 14y ago
    I meant "smooth zoom" I guess? I can pinch in from anywhere on the page and center in on any particular item at any particular zoom level. Unless I've missed something, Chrome seems to have "integral" stepwise zooming, which also always zooms from the center of the page (vs where my mouse cursor is). It ends up feeling like Safari's old zoom which would just make the individual items bigger (as opposed to actually scaling the page), but I'm pretty sure Chrome is indeed scaling the page, just doing it in a way that I find frustrating and less useful. Another example, I'm watching an embedded YouTube video which thus annoyingly doesn't allow fullscreen, so I double tap it, and it fills the browser window, and it seems to be smart enough to render at correct resolution at that scale (since it still allows you to choose a higher resolution even though it won't full screen). To do similar feats with Chrome I have to manually jigger things around.
- malandrew 14y ago
  The tab behavior in chrome is what does it for me too. In fact, you can have so many tabs that you can no longer open the last tabs (the tabs extend past the little full screen or switch user icon). I also think Safari has a much better solution for handling bookmarking when you have multiple tabs. Solve these two issues and I'd switch to Chrome in a second.
  - lallysingh 14y ago
    Check out the Chrome Web Store. There are several tab management extensions. One's a quick tab list with a search box.
  - levifig 14y ago
    I actually prefer Firefox's approach to multiple tabs: the tab bar scrolls (you can use the scroll wheel). That's about the only thing I like in Firefox anymore though… Been using Chrome because of its multi-user support (tied in with Google accounts) but Safari is soooo much better than Chrome in terms of UI and UX… Latest Chrome betas, with the full integration of the address bar as a full-blown "Google box" (e.g. you start typing, it loads Google Instant Search without the page's classic search box)… I digress… :)
Camillo 14y ago
I can confirm what tolmasky said about WebKit2, yet I'm also a Safari user. The interface just feels better for me, and Chrome has actually been getting worse in this respect. When I stopped using it, a few versions ago, it had started feeling more and more like a Chrome OS VM than like a browser on my Mac. I doubt they've changed course since then.
kalleboo 14y ago
Safari is the only browser that has decent scrolling performance on a Retina MacBook. All the other browsers stutter really badly as soon as the page has any complexity with fixed elements (Facebook is a big one)
- kevincennis 14y ago
  Yeah, that's certainly true. Pretty frustrating to have spent $2,500 or whatever it was on my retina MBP and I can't smoothly scroll websites with more than like 500 DOM nodes in Chrome.
- smackfu 14y ago
  That's a case where Apple has to optimize the heck out of Safari until it is workable on that particular new machine, otherwise it would get terrible reviews and hurt the overall brand. Chrome doesn't have the same incentives to get that particular machine working well, especially since the next revision of the Retina Macbook probably won't even need special handling since it will surely have a more powerful GPU. They can just wait it out, similar to what happened with the iPad 3 vs iPad 4, where people had to optimize for the iPad 3 and then those optimizations were unneeded on the iPad 4.
  - lloeki 14y ago
    > That's a case where Apple has to optimize the heck out of Safari until it is workable Actually, they "merely" leverage their platform by using CoreAnimation, making it GPU accelerated (and enabling pinch-to-zoom), while Chrome scrolling hits the CPU really hard.
- saebekassebil 14y ago
  So true, this is actually one of the things that almost convinced me to switch to Safari. I'd miss the Developer Tools though..
  - Camillo 14y ago
    But the developer tools are in Safari.
workbench 14y ago
Interface is nicer and more native. Chrome is even starting to drop native dialog boxes
samclearman 14y ago
No way to disable tabs (in particular the default "open in new tab" behavior) in Chrome.

mikewest 14y ago

Safari is using WebKit2, and has been for some time. The "preproduction prototype" bit of that Wiki is a bit out of date.

macrael 14y ago

Wikipedia says WebKit2 has been part of Safari since Safari 5.1 which I believe was released with Lion, or so. So it absolutely is in production. The major difference here being that WebKit2 is part of the webkit project, so as the rendering engine (which sits atop both webkit1 and webkit2) is improved by all the various parties involved in WebKit's development, it gets better for everyone. Google's fork now means that changes to the rendering engine they make to Blink will no longer have any effect on the WebKit project, which does seem to be a major difference. I don't know all the history here, but my understanding is that Chrome's engine was never offered in that same sort of way. It was just part of the chromium project, apparently a part that increased the difficulty of integrating with WebKit, not an api intended to be taken by others and integrated into their browser.

coldtea 14y ago
>The major difference here being that WebKit2 is part of the webkit project, so as the rendering engine (which sits atop both webkit1 and webkit2) is improved by all the various parties involved in WebKit's development, it gets better for everyone. That's in theory. In practice nobody bothered besides Apple.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- LeonidasXIV 14y ago
  The recently released Epiphany 3.8 (part of GNOME 3.8) uses WebKit2, so there are others who care.
dragonwriter 14y ago
> The major difference here being that WebKit2 is part of the webkit project, so as the rendering engine (which sits atop both webkit1 and webkit2) is improved by all the various parties involved in WebKit's development, it gets better for everyone. Google's fork now means that changes to the rendering engine they make to Blink will no longer have any effect on the WebKit project, which does seem to be a major difference. It also means that the work they do on the rendering engine for Blink won't be constrained by the constraints imposed by support the various WebKit implementations.

mtgx 14y ago

You're assuming it's the exact same multi-process architecture. Is it, really?

othermaciej 14y ago

You're right that Chrome's multiprocess architecture is more mature than the WebKit2 design. I wish we hadn't ended up in a position where we felt we had to make our own. But stay tuned - we have some great stuff coming up.

easytiger 14y ago

all of this all the more hilarious because the current version of Safari is functionally broken to the point where it is unusable

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]