This is a question with a really easy answer: Chrome is the best browser out there right now. That's it. No deep mystery, just a superior product.
Why Hasn’t Safari Skyrocketed Like Chrome Has?
21–30 of 41 posts
Re: Why Hasn’t Safari Skyrocketed Like Chrome Has?
#22Is this just for desktop browsers?
Re: Why Hasn’t Safari Skyrocketed Like Chrome Has?
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would add it seems to work almost intuitively, but I find Safari works against me (on Windows). And it may just be a coincidence, but it's similar to QuickTime. Yay! There's a new trailer for the Alien prequel out, and it's ... hosted at Apple. That means I'll see it in a window that doesn't full screen, whose controls don't work right, and it probably won't even download regardless of how often I click it. Thank t…
Chrome ruined Safari for me. When I fire up Safari more often than not I end up doing this: http://i.imgur.com/nDk2R.png
Re: Why Hasn’t Safari Skyrocketed Like Chrome Has?
#24Safari on Windows was never intended to garner market share. It was created so that web site authors that couldn't be bothered to have a Mac could checkout how their site works on Safari. It has succeeded wildly.
Remember, these were darker days. Webkit was the strange thing on the internet. There was no Chrome. There was Konqueror, but the webkits had diverged. You made your site work on IE and Firefox in your preferred order, then after drying your tears with the shredded remains of your schedule gave two minute's thought to making it not obviously be complete rubbish on Safari and maybe Opera.
So of course it sucks on windows.
• It feels like a Mac but in a Windows world which is like speaking English with an outrageously French accent.
• It operates through layers of compatibility designed to identically preserve the Mac behavior above perform well.
• When you come down to it, it is the away team. If the user wanted a Mac experience, they'd have a Mac.
Re: Why Hasn’t Safari Skyrocketed Like Chrome Has?
#25Could just be me; But I've never found any "Apple" software that wasn't miserable to use on windows. iTunes, QuickTime, Safari... I assume laziness or the feeling that it just isn't necessary on the part of Apple; But who knows. As for why I use Chrome (Even on my Macs); It's just more pleasant to use. It's the sort of thing that's hard to put a finger on, though it does run google web apps way better than the compet…
It's not just you. I hated Apple for the first half of last decade because until about 2005, I was only exposed to Apple software for Windows, which is abysmal. Using Apple software on a Mac blew my mind.
Even though Chrome and Safari share a foundation, I just find Chrome more usable. Things like keyboard commands to open the last closed tab, how it waits to resize tabs until after you move your mouse away form the tab bar, and the animated sorting of tabs just to name a couple. Chrome feels faster too; hard to quantify, but apparently quite important to user perception.
Re: Why Hasn’t Safari Skyrocketed Like Chrome Has?
#26I use both on my machine. Safari is my "Facebook" browser -- I use it for Facebook and Facebook alone. Chrome is my everything else browser. Mainly because it has a unified url/search bar. I have no idea with Safari hasn't picked this up, but that's pretty much it. Oh and also because all the google apps just seem to work better on Chrome. I used use Firefox as my everything browser, but it got just too slow. I mostl…
> Mainly because it has a unified url/search bar. I have no idea with Safari hasn't picked this up Privacy, perhaps? Doesn't a unified url/search bar require giving more information to Google (or whatever your default search provider is)?
Not necessarily. All a url/search bar needs to do is check if what you enter is a valid URL, then search if that fails. (And maybe also if DNS resolution fails?) If it's a valid URL, it never needs to hit the search engine... if it is, that's when you want to search anyway.
Re: Why Hasn’t Safari Skyrocketed Like Chrome Has?
#27The answers are pretty obvious. 1. Chrome is marketed all over the web (and in real life) and bundled through shareware. Google is spending a tremendous amount of money to market Chrome. Apple is not doing that with Safari. 2. Safari is the default in OS X, but OS X is still small compared to Windows. 3. Safari on Windows is not as fast as Safari on OS X, presumably because Apple cares more about one than the other,…
Using John Gruber's publicly reported stats as one data point, Safari commands a majority share on Mac OS X.
Re: Why Hasn’t Safari Skyrocketed Like Chrome Has?
#281. It's fast
2. It updates automatically
3. It's fast
4. I can have all my settings/passwords/bookmarks synced across all my machines regardless of OS
5. It's fast. It opens faster than notebook.exe on Windows and Preview.app on OSX
Re: Why Hasn’t Safari Skyrocketed Like Chrome Has?
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Mainly because it has a unified url/search bar. I have no idea with Safari hasn't picked this up Privacy, perhaps? Doesn't a unified url/search bar require giving more information to Google (or whatever your default search provider is)?
Not necessarily. All a url/search bar needs to do is check if what you enter is a valid URL, then search if that fails. (And maybe also if DNS resolution fails?) If it's a valid URL, it never needs to hit the search engine... if it is, that's when you want to search anyway.
The default in Chrome seems to be to do search suggestion as you type in the unified bar, so for instance if you decide to visit linear.com and do so by typing linear.com and hitting return, after you type "linear" and before you type the "." it suggests "linear equations", "linear algebra", and "linear regression".
Their documentation says it is doing this by sending the data to Google whenever you pause while typing in the bar, and that 2% of these requests are randomly logged, and it is anonymized within 24 hours.
Re: Why Hasn’t Safari Skyrocketed Like Chrome Has?
#30This article arrives at the answer and keeps walking. It points out that most people who have used it think Safari on Windows sucks, but somehow refutes that with the fact that it's only a little slower than Firefox and it's version 5.1. What?
MG Siegler. (not a snark, check out his previous articles)