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Comment by elliottcable | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been using Safari as my ‘relaxation browser’ for ages; Chrome never felt “right” to me, even though I use it every day for development and various other reasons.

Interestingly enough, I’ve heard the same thing as you just pointed out, out of a lot of people since Lion. A lot of people who had previously laughed at me for remaining with Safari (as if it’s somehow inherently inferior to Chrome? I’ve never quite understood it.) are now, themselves, switching back … just for gestures, as far as I can tell.

I have to ask: Is it really that much of a life-changing feature for you, in a browser?

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I enjoyed Safari for about an hour in Lion (because of the gestures, and how they broke in Chrome), and then immediately went right back to Chrome. Apple's done a lot to improve Safari over the years (especially recently), but it's still not close to where it needs to be for everyday browsing. Development is pretty equal, although I'll always find myself using Chrome over it because of Chrome's much, much faster release schedule of improvements to Webkit's tools. Safari gets them... eventually. Eventually isn't good enough these days, when entire new pieces of technology appear in the span of months.

For regular browsing, I can't stand not having:

* Favicons on the tabs. It's impossible to glance at 5+ tabs in Safari without getting completely lost.

* Favicons on the bookmarks bar. My bookmarks bar doesn't have a single character on it, it's all just favicons with blank names that makes it into a horizontal list of frequently used sites.

* Any sort of Synching. Right now my Chromes at Work, Home Desktop, Laptop, and Tablet are completely in-tune with each other.

* A real omnibar/awesomebar. There are some extensions that make this more bearable, but the default address and search bars are pretty worthless.

If you want a bleeding-edge WebKit development tool, sometimes even more bleeding-edge than Chrome Canary/Chromium build, try out WebKit Nightly. It just swap out Safari's WebKit for Nightly WebKit while the whole Safari experience remains the same. Since the whole inspector stuff was done completely in HTML/JavaScript, you get a more up-to-date development tools with it too.

About your other points.

>A real omnibar/awesomebar

I've found Chrome's Omnibar to be very annoying, to be honest. The last version I tried (probably Chrome 14) still couldn't do substring searching for titles or maybe even URLs. Pressing control for navigation (standard Emacs C-n, C-p stuff) change the ordering of navigation items. I've found it to be very much unpredictable and is one of my main reason of not using Chrome as a primary browser.

Firefox's AwesomeBar is awesome, though, only if I could navigate using C-n C-p.

>Syncing

Xmarks[1] works beautifully across browsers and platforms. I've used it to sync between Safari, Firefox and Chrome without any problems.

>Favicons

Have you tried out Glims[2]?

[1]: http://www.xmarks.com/ [2]: http://wiki.machangout.com/howdoi/glims-development-build

Chrome's Omnibar is under intense development, and the latest stable version (13) now supports substring matches on almost everything. The flags in 14 and 15 basically turn it completely into Firefox's Awesomebar.

Xmarks is ok, but it only covers a fraction of Chrome's synching, which includes Bookmarks, Passwords, Form Input, Extensions, and Preferences. And it's being completely integrated with their forthcoming Profiles feature, which means that I can finally easily switch between dev extensions enabled (which otherwise use a LOT of resources if left on for regular browsing) and normal profiles, and the bookmarks/passwords of a significant other don't interfere with my own.

I haven't checked out Glims, so thanks for the link.

Xmarks on the other hand supports tagging which Google still not managed to implement. I'm using Xmarks (for cross-browser syncing) as well as Chrome's native sync but after setting up a new OS install I've got every bookmark twice.

I'll admit i'm biased here as I also use chrome primarily, but:

Your assertion that safari gets webkit changes later is correct if you restrict yourself to official releases. But if you include the nightlies, I'd say the gui application we call safari wins out over chrome. The changes to webcore, note i'm omitting javascript interpreter changes since google plugs v8 into webcore/kit, tend to show up in the webkit project and thus webkit nightlies well before google merges them into chrome/chromium.

I use lastpass/xmarks for syncing though. Just because I like the option of ditching chrome if I ever need to. And I pay the $20/yr so I can get the desktop/mobile versions in sync too. i* devices included.

I totally agree on the favicons part, wonder if there would be a way to make an extension bookmark bar or modify the tabs. Haven't looked at what the allowed extensions can do.

On that note, extension syncing, chrome is about the only browser that gets this part right. I wish all would allow pref synchronization, half the reason I despise firefox is getting all my extensions in sync on each computer.

I actually find the omnibar incredibly frustrating, as I know when I want to search and I know when I want to find something from my history. For me, these are separate tasks and combining them makes me slower because I have to mentally filter out the unrelated results.

I'd love to see Google vs. Apple's research for one vs. the other. It seems to be one of the polarizing issues.

My behaviour is pretty much the same — Safari for personal browsing, Chrome for dev. Chrome is very nice, but Safari is a lot more "solid", especially when it comes to 3D Transforms and other advanced features.

Safari 5.1 on Lion isn't a life changer, but the gestures just feel right. Going back to Chrome feels like taking a step backwards, especially on a Magic Mouse where the double-finger-sideways swipe is still somewhat awkward.

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