Why Hasn’t Safari Skyrocketed Like Chrome Has?

http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/24/safari-and-chrome/

by hshah • 15 years ago

26 40 15 years ago

techcrunch.com

breckinloggins• 15 years ago

I use Chrome on all platforms for which it's available for three reasons:

1. It's fast

2. It updates automatically

3. It has a single location/search bar

For me, that's it. Really.

jerrya• 15 years ago

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 the FSM, someone has posted a link to the trailer on YouTube.

sjs• 15 years ago

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

shinratdr• 15 years ago

Apple doesn't promote Safari for Windows and it doesn't offer a very compelling experience on that platform. On the other hand, Google has been pushing Chrome like crazy.

MBCook• 15 years ago

I've been using Safari on every Mac I use since I switched back to the platform in '04 or so. It's a nice browser, has all the features I want, and it's quite fast. I've played with Chrome a bit, and it may be faster, but Safari is fast enough.

But that's on a Mac.

At my last job I had a Windows box. I installed Safari as soon as it was released on Windows for testing purposes. I wouldn't have minded switching, but there was one cold fact in the way: Safari was a pig.

I haven't used it on Windows in about a year, so it may be better, but at the time it took a long time to start Safari up. Later releases were better, but it still would feel slow launching and opening tabs. All and all, I stayed with FireFox.

I recommend Safari as a good browser for anyone who uses OS X. When people I know have bought Macs and asked if they need to download FF or Chrome, I tell them there is no need. Give Safari a try. Only one or two hasn't stuck with it, it fits all their needs.

On Windows I would tell them FF or Chome. Based on my experience there was no reason to recommend Safari.

I think it's too late. Even if Apple made Safari an amazing browser on Windows it's a very crowded market. FF is huge, Chrome is big and gaining. IE 8/9 are pretty nice browsers. That's 3 good choices. I have a hard time seeing Apple get any meaningful Windows marketshare.

Frankly, I think Safari is only on Windows to allow developers to test their sites to work better on iOS without having the devices or Macs. Any promotion to consumers is very half-hearted.

j45• 15 years ago

Safari gives me the feeling that IE does for some reason. Maybe because it's linked to the OS creator?

chc• 15 years ago

This 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?

etherael• 15 years ago

MG Siegler. (not a snark, check out his previous articles)

jinushaun• 15 years ago

I don't think that's the answer. It sucks on Mac too.

jedberg• 15 years ago

I 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 mostly only use it for testing and doing front-end development.

sliverstorm2• 15 years ago

I too abandoned Firefox for Chrome as FF got worse, but Firefox 8 is pretty good again- if you don't load it up with addons.

tzs2• 15 years ago

> 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)?

ajdecon• 15 years ago

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.

flatline• 15 years ago

I mainly use Chrome now, FF sometimes. There's a simple reason I never installed Safari on Windows: it was pushed on me through Apple Update.

drivebyacct2• 15 years ago

Safari has the same problems that Firefox has had in Linux for me. Slow startups, not terribly responsive tabs. In addition, it hides downloads on the FS until they're finished, the download box is awkward, and frankly, it still inferior to Chrome.

jdpage• 15 years ago

Nitpick - the Webkit layout engine wasn't born at Apple. It's derived from KHTML, which is part of the Konqueror and KDE projects.

tseabrooks• 15 years ago

Could 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 competition which is a huge reason for me also.

sliverstorm2• 15 years ago

Safari's interface is obtuse, slow, and unintuitive. Also (Apple-style) the hitboxes for important buttons are smaller than they need be.

There, I put my finger on it.

benihana• 15 years ago

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.

langsamer• 15 years ago

Safari's integration of bookmarks and reading lists over iCloud is just such a useful feature to have out of the box. I switched back to Safari just for that. Keeping all my devices in sync is a huge gain over slightly faster rendering times.

cheald• 15 years ago

Chrome provides similar integrations, except it also can also sync extensions, passwords, themes, and lots of other data, making it very easy to basically carry the same environment with you no matter where you're using it.

verroq• 15 years ago

Apple products just suck on windows. Look at the massive piece of shit that is Quicktime and iTunes. I don't think that anyone that has used either wants to use another Apple product on windows.

azakai• 15 years ago

The 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, whereas Chrome is fast on both platforms. The author seems to assume that since they are both WebKit browsers, that means they are the same, but that isn't true by any measure: First, Google doesn't use the WebKit multiprocess code or the WebKit JS engine, it has its own, and both of those components are very important for speed; and second, even aside from those there are many factors that go into making a browser fast, and just using WebKit (or Gecko or Trident or whatever) doesn't fix them automatically.

The real question is how many people use Safari on OS X. That's where it is optimized and bundled. I am guessing the percentage is pretty high, but if it is low, then that would be a surprising fact that requires explanation.

ootachi• 15 years ago

Using John Gruber's publicly reported stats as one data point, Safari commands a majority share on Mac OS X.

toddheasley• 15 years ago

I work for a very large (Fortune 500) retailer whose customers are overwhelmingly Mac users. Safari users make up just shy of 50% of all of our traffic, with Chrome accounting for 25%.

I'd guess that's as much because Safari is the built-in, default option on OS X and iOS as it is because Safari is just super awesome. The more interesting thing to me is that all of my (Mac-using)coworkers have switched over (mostly from Firefox) to Chrome, despite Chrome's overall jankyness on OS X.

xenomachina• 15 years ago

Are these stats based on his site's users? If so then I'd expect them to skew towards Apple fanboys, not just Mac users. I use a Mac, but I can't stand to read Daring Fireball. It's like the Fox News of tech blogs.

jpaves• 15 years ago

The search bar!

redthrowaway• 15 years ago

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.

lazugod• 15 years ago

Is this just for desktop browsers?

jws• 15 years ago

Safari 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.

statictype• 15 years ago

1. 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

mikeash• 15 years ago

In addition to what others have said, Safari 5.1 moved to a subprocess model somewhat like Chrome but the change went severely wrong. Memory usage skyrocketed, and speed and stability both took a big dive. After using Safari pretty much exclusively since it was originally released, the awful 5.1 release prompted me to switch to Chrome and I haven't looked back since.

Apple's attention really is turned to the mobile space today, and the non-mobile Safari suffers for it.

loso• 15 years ago

I will give the same answer that many on this page have given, Apple software is horrible on Windows. Safari horrible, Quicktime, horrible, iTunes, the granddaddy of horrible. He really didn't have to go any further with the story, he already answered his own question.

I like the idea of iTunes and open it occasionally but after a day or two of using it, I am reminded of just how bad it really is.

jballanc• 15 years ago

Browsers are interesting beasts. Sure, you can compete on speed and compatibility with both standards and existing sites, but only to a point. Once you reach that point, then what? Most of the interaction you will have with a browser is outside the control of the browser (i.e. the code of the sites you visit, ultimately, accounts for 95% of your interaction with a browser).

I've found that browsers have become a study in small touches and interesting niches. Firefox, for a long time, had a lock on the "I want to mod the hell out of this" niche. Meanwhile, as trite as it sounds, I couldn't leave Safari for the longest time because I had become addicted to the address bar also showing load progress.

These days, I use Chrome, but not because of speed. I use Chrome because I have become addicted to OpenSearch (the "Press tab to search this site"). Apple's refusal to merge the address bar and search bar used to be forgivable, but it is increasingly becoming a pointless distinction to hold out on (and will cost them market share).

Legion• 15 years ago

People talk about Safari being bad on Windows, but frankly, it offers little reason to use it on a Mac either.

Really, the only thing that prevents Safari from being the "worst" mainstream browser is the existence of IE.

It's not awful. It just pairs mediocre performance with fewer features and lower extensibility.

rdl• 15 years ago

I'm not a big fan of Safari on Mac either; I use Chrome everywhere, and Firefox only if I want to debug something with firebug. I use Safari only if I need a quick way to run a browser with no personalization settings, to see how sites work.

Slimy• 15 years ago

tl;dr

Safari sucks, especially on Windows.

Chrome rocks, especially on Windows.

Why Hasn’t Safari Skyrocketed Like Chrome Has?

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