I’ve been using some flavor of Google Chrome for Mac as my primary browser for the last two months or so. For a long time, I was running nightly builds of Chromium instead of Chrome proper because standard Chrome for Mac doesn’t, as of now, allow pinning of tabs, which is huge for me, now that they’ve invented or popularized it. ¹ 

Another huge thing is that I couldn’t afford to buy a laptop for school, but I could afford a fast USB drive. I run my own browsers directly from my USB drive, including Chrome for Mac and Windows. The advantage here is having my own browser, and not having to worry about passwords or even entering credit card information. Once I close down the browser and remove my USB drive, the data is gone. With this setup, the fact that Chrome itself will sync bookmarks across computers, no problem, saves a lot of time and is very convienant.

Apple’s Safari, which has been around since 2003, is a really great browser. It works well on Mac, Windows, and iPhone, and for me, is the browser to beat. It’s so good that Chrome was built with the same rendering engine. That is, under the  hood, where the browser actually interprets Web pages, Safari and Chrome are the same. It’s all the other stuff, interfaces and features and things you see and click on that are different.

With Safari 4, Apple, like Google Chrome, put the tabs at the very top of the window. Most people didn’t like that very much. I like tabs on the top, but thought that Apple’s implementation wasn’t perfect. Even with the tabs back in their, “proper,” place, Safari’s been my daily browser for years.

I keep Firefox around because I feel it’s always good to have an alternate browser for if things act wrong in Safari, or if I need to use a service I’m already signed into, only as a different user, like Netflix. Firefox is pretty good on Windows machines, but feels like a pig on Macs. Camino uses the same rendering engine as Firefox, but actually behaves like a Mac program (albeit a kind of stupid Mac program). Opera is only worthwhile on crappy cell phones that don’t come with a proper mobile browser. If I’m missing any other browsers, it’s because they’re far too stupid to mention.

Another thing that Chrome does better than Safari is its handling of tabs. If I have a normal, unpinned tab open, and I ctrl-click a link to open that link in a new tab, it opens the new tab right next to the tab I’m currently in. If I did the same thing in Safari, Safari would put the new tab out to the very right, at the end of my row of tabs. This is, of course, down to personal preference, but I prefer what Chrome does.

The only place where Safari really does something better than Chrome is syncing bookmarks to my iPhone. Chrome can’t do it, but Safari can. My workaround here is pretty simple: every now and again, export bookmarks out of Chrome, import them into Safari, and tell Safari to sync to Mobile Me. It’s usually not a big deal, but intra-browser bookmark sharing would be pretty cool.

So what Chrome did, as far as I’m concerned, was to improve upon Safari in the places Safari could be improved upon. Chrome’s got pinned tabs, which I really like; the download bar is flat-out superior to Safari’s download window; it syncs bookmarks across computers; it handles tabs better; it looks and feels like a Mac program.

I have to stress: pinned tabs are, for me,  a make-or-break item. Standard Chrome does not support pinned tabs, but the dev version does. Which is why, if you click the title of this little entry, you will be taken to a Web page where you can download the Mac dev version of Chrome. Frankly, even with everything else it’s got, without the pinned tabs, Chrome just wouldn’t be compelling enough to switch from Safari.

However, there is no feature or interface that’s less good than Safari, and more than a few that are better than Safari. And Safari wont pin its tabs yet.

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1. I think there was a Firefox extension that came first. ↩