Why I've switched from Chrome to Safari

Didn't syncing/sharing across devices a more recent thing? Not something that came out of the box in 2008.

Chrome syncing was never a problem for me with iOS, I find it more annoying that Google keeps changing the UI and I can't find/figure out how to view tabs from other machines.

Safari visually looks much better, I don't know if Chrome's font problems apply to MacOSX or if Apple is able to tailor Safari for MacOSX/iOS. Overall scrolling feel the same for me.

The stuff he mentions as missing in Safari though are huge dealbreakers for me to switch over. I use the "View as Desktop mode" in Chrome and I need Developer Extensions

iOS user complains that Apple doesn't allow third parties to make better iOS apps, and blames the third party.

Back inside the fence with you!

Add to that the butter smooth scrolling of Safari on Retina displays.

I tried this for a while. Before, I was using chrome on OS X and safari on iOS, just tolerating the lack of bookmark sync. I switched to safari on OS X because chrome was being slow, and images would suddenly stop loading. But using safari full time made me run screaming in the other direction on all platforms and I just switched back to chrome, I'm even using it 100% on iOS now that I worked around the problems in the article.

Safari on OS X has so many annoying little behaviors that become a problem in constant use. Things like accidentally closing a tab (or a whole window with 40 of them) and being unable to get them back without scrolling through history, or the poor handling of the tab bar, forcing you to click the drop down to get to the rest of them when there are too many to fit on screen at once. One that constantly bit me: right click a selection and search with google. In chrome it's in a new tab, in safari it blows away what you were doing in the same tab.

I also found out TLS client certificates on a websocket cause the connection to fail in Safari on OS X, it never authenticates and it shows up in a non-obvious way. I lost a whole 2 days of dev time on that thinking I did something wrong, only to notice it worked in chrome.

Safari was also crashing all the time, both in the middle of important things like writing a few paragraphs in a text box (and having them vanish), but also on stuff that is a major core function of the browser like typing in the URL bar.

I do like iCloud Keychain but it still works on iOS because Chrome on OS X puts passwords in the keychain and they get synced. It may not autofill in chrome on iOS (edit: it does I just tried) but I haven't noticed, I only have to enter passwords 1-2 times every few weeks, the rest of the time sessions stick around.

Safari also made me realize I needed bookmark sync on iOS very badly, so I had to get that feature back with Chrome.

The main problems in the article about chrome on iOS - lacking the fast JS engine, and inability to set chrome as the default browser (which leads to other problems) - were solved by jailbreaking and I'm absolutely pleased with the result I'll never give it up now. My stuff still syncs (yay bookmarks!), and chrome now handles all links from other apps and emails so I actually end up using it instead of accidentally ending up in safari. And it does a lot of little things better, like the reappearance behavior of the URL/tab bar during scrolling, VERY nice. Plus chrome dev tools are low friction for me, while safari again annoyed me to no end.

Something about google being a company whose developers spend a lot of time on the web doing development, and dogfooding chrome in the process, has resulted in Chrome being low friction in ways safari isn't.