Where Google’s Chrome Beats Safari and Firefox

Despite life in the Golden Age of Mac Browsers™, there are marked differences in the approach taken by the three major browser makers.

Mozilla’s Firefox contains about every browser feature known to human kind. The list of tools is worthy. There are add-ons galore; appearance themes, plugins, extensions, and much more. It’s a geek’s delight. But all those features mean a cluttered interface.

Apple’s Safari, by comparison, is lean and not so mean. It’s tidy, uncluttered, and gets out of your visual way. There are extensions and plugins, but no easy way to customize Safari’s look and feel. That’s Apple’s way. Bookmark management is superb, page rendering speed is as good as it gets, but stability could use some improvement; especially with Flash installed

In between Firefox and Safari sits the fastest growing browser among Mac or PC users. Google’s Chrome. For the most part, it’s fast, too, not cluttered, but not an interface that’s well thought out. It’s as if an engineer took a design class during summer vacation and declared himself a designer.

Here’s what Chrome has going for it that I find I really like. It’s fast. Pages load as quickly (if not quicker) than the other browsers. Other than being nearly ugly, it’s uncluttered. The tab design is horrible, but at least they’re on top where they should be. Flash is built-in, and seems to work better than the Flash plugin for Firefox and Safari.

This is the future of app maintenance. Chrome updates itself on the fly. Instead of me receiving a notice, or checking MacUpdate, or hearing about it elsewhere, then finding the update, then downloading it, then installing it, Chrome updates itself to the latest version.

There’s no decent bookmark management, but I use Xmarks for that. At least Chrome keeps itself up to date.