As a test, I’ve used Google Chrome (on a mac) for the last week. The mac version now seems to be as feature rich as the Windows version, so I thought I’d give it a try to see how it compares to my browser of choice, Safari. I’ve always had a thing for browsers, and I have a general distaste for them overall. I think tabs are horrible, back/forward buttons are insane, the URL bar is ridiculous, and so on. I even wrote my own browser once (well, I started with an existing browser and hacked my own, which I think was not the best idea now, but anyways..).

After the week, I think I’ll go back to Safari, but Chrome is my second favourite browser. I wouldn’t suffer much to switch. Sure, there are some things that bug me now, but they would go away as I adjusted to doing things in different ways. There are some things I prefer in Chrome over Safari. And so, it might be only the familiarity that is bringing me back to Safari. Regardless, I’ll keep my eye on Chrome and might consider switching back depending on how it evolves.

To start, the tab interface is beautiful. Safari 4 beta switched to ‘tabs on top’, but it’s implementation was not great, and for the official release, it switched back to tabs on the bottom. Chrome’s implementation is more novel, practical, and elegant. The animation when one opens and closes tabs is fantastic.

Another novel aspect of the tab bar is the ability to ‘pin’ tabs. What this does is make the tab very small, and removes the close button.

This is slick for web apps that one wants to have open all the time. If one prefers using web apps to desktop apps, this might be reason enough to prefer Chrome to Safari. The concept makes sense because it separates the “browsing” tabs (the non-pinned ones) from the web apps. It might make sense to push this further though and allow to do things like hide the URL bar and the toolbar for pinned apps, even by default. If one is going to keep those tabs open, then buttons just clutter the interface. And as an example, if you want to keep gmail or facebook open in a pinned tab all the time, one probably doesn’t want to navigate off of it or ever use the back or forward buttons. Webapps often don’t particularly jive with those buttons anyways. It would be nice if the browser kept a list of ‘pinned apps’ somewhere, and whenever you browse to one of those sites, it automatically loaded it in a new pinned tab without the UI clutter. Sites could opt-in to the list as well. I think this will go a long way to allowing full-featured webapps, and I can see why it is natural for Chrome OS. Personally, I tend to use desktop apps wherever possible, so this isn’t too big a deal for me. For Safari users, one can sort of “emulate” this pinned tab behaviour by using Fluid.app which is a way of turning webapps into their own desktop or menubar app, so that you can make your own gmail app for example. This enables you to only use the main browser, for browsing rather than using apps.

The notification of site loading progress is way better in Safari. All that Chrome uses is a turning wheel. Safari uses the rightmost inch of the URL bar turning blue from left to right to indicate notification. Safari 3 was even better than Safari 4 as it would use the entire URL bar as a progress indicator, whereas Safari 4 uses only part of it, but at least there is some sense of progress. Constantly in Chrome, I find myself confused as to whether a page has reloaded, or whether it has started reloading. I look up, and all you see is a spinning wheel, and that doesn’t much help. There is no sense of progress. This small difference has a big effect, and is a major reason for me switching back. (Incidentally Safari on the iPad is going back to the old Safari 3 based full URL bar notification as shown in this video). Also, as pointed out by Gruber, Chrome puts the close buttons on the right side of each tab. This totally messed with me and I always shot for the left side. Granted, this is a habit that could be changed, every tab and window on OS X has the close button on the left, so if you differ from that you better have a good reason. I’m not sure why they don’t switch the favicon and the close button.

A more minor gripe in Chrome is that clicking on a bookmark folder opens it, and clicking it again, opens it again instead of going away. This is different than everything else in OS X, where any button that pulls down a menu, or the menubar itself, closes the menu when you click it a second time. This is the standard Cocoa behaviour. It’s a small thing, but I definitely kept messing up over and over.

Also, Safari has a lightweight rss reader built-in. Although it is not as feature rich as Google Reader, it supports encrypted feeds. This is probably not a big deal for most people, but for me, Safari is the only rss reader I use that supports them.

Safari’s implementation of “Top Sites” (similar to the new tab page in Chrome) is quite a bit better. The biggest problem with Chrome’s implementation is that it is not possible to choose and fix the position of a site at a position. So you can’t really customize it as a website launcher, and you lose spatial memory. Also you can only fit 8 pages on there versus a maximum of 24 on Safari, and so you can’t really use it as a fully featured launcher.

Overall, I think Chrome has potential, and I would use it ahead of Safari 2 say. And depending on how one uses their computer, one might prefer it. If I used Windows, I’d probably use it as my primary browser.