I’m finally beginning to consider making the switch to Chrome as my default web browser. Chrome isn’t new. But when it first appeared in 2008, it was for Windows only, so I couldn’t run it on my Mac. Developer previews for Mac OS X became available in 2009, but it was hardly stable. You could launch the browser to see how it looks, load one or two web pages, but it would crash before you could really do anything with it. The official stable version for Mac OS X was finally released in May 2010. Now, I’m starting to look seriously at what Chrome can do.
Chrome is fast. That had always been a big advantage. It made better use of screen real estate, particularly in how the way tabs are rendered in the UI. (Safari did it the Chrome way during one of its beta phases, but the final release versions reverted to the traditional tabbed interface.)
But I’ve always been a stickler for standards compliance and interoperability. I loved Safari because it aced the Acid3 tests with a perfect score. No other web browser managed that. Not including Chrome, even though it was also based on WebKit like Safari is.
Chrome has made great strides. It now also gets a perfect score on the Acid3 tests. On top of that, on the HTML5 compliance tests, Chrome actually edged out over Safari (although by a small margin). It’s a little surprising, because I had the impression that Safari would have made HTML5 support a priority. At least that’s what Apple seems to want to support. Or perhaps it was just marketing strategy, because Steve Jobs did not want to support Adobe Flash. Well, Chrome wins HTML5 compliance right now.
Chrome on Mac OS X also integrates properly into the Mac way of doing things. For example, the idea that passwords are centrally managed in Keychain.
So now… is it the right time to switch?
Update: My own benchmarks seem to show (by visual impression) that Safari actually loads up faster than Chrome, on a MacBook Pro. The difference is very marginal, but it is noticeable. I’m quite surprised. But in terms of memory usage (observed from Activity Monitor), Chrome is very significantly more memory efficient than Safari.
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