I’ve been using Chrome as my default browser recently. It’s fast - it feels faster than Safari, to me - and I love the lightweight interface. I’ve been lured back to Safari though, with the recent introduction of version 5.0.
Safari has finally received native support for extensions, something that Firefox and Chrome users have enjoyed for a long time. They’ve implemented them nicely too; you just use HTML, CSS, and Javascript to build them, rather than the unfamilar XUL markup that Firefox uses. From Apple’s code samples, I was able to get a basic extension working within 10 minutes - it inserts the word “elephant” at the top of every page. Let me know if you’d like a copy.
The “Reader” feature looks great - I particularly like the way it intelligently joins multi-page articles together. I won’t, however, be throwing out Instapaper any time soon; I love the idea that you can save an article for future reading.
It’s speedy. Though it’s interesting to note that Safari runs Javascript runs merely three percent faster than Chrome. Seems pretty negligible to me.
It has intelligent URL guessing. When you’re typing in the address bar, it performs a substring match on your bookmarks and your history, in both the URL and the page title.
It’s more Mac-like. You can use OS X’s services, such as typing cmd-ctrl-D while hovering over a word to get a dictionary definition, something that Chrome doesn’t support.
All-in-all, a welcome upgrade. The fierce competition ‘twixt Apple and Google is great news for tech fans - long may the arms race continue.
