That's a perfectly valid question. Lots of people use Chrome because they've used Chrome, and that's the whole reason. Some people need Chrome because it supports some site or tool that they require. I recommend that everyone else at least try Safari and see what they think of it.
Last time I tried it (couple of months ago) there were practically no extensions and Bitwarden didn't work in incognito. And Chrome's UI/UX is simply great. And dev tools as well.
Sure, I've never used Safari enough myself to have an opinion (since it's never been an option for me due to various things), it might be equal to Chrome or even better (I like Safari's clean UI). I'm mostly comparing it to Firefox which is quite clunky in my opinion (I've given it many chances).
And I'm actually typing this on Safari now and it looks like the issue has been fixed - Bitwarden now works in private mode. Maybe it's time to give it yet another shot. :)
Don't know if the numbers are comparable but in Chrome's Task Manager the numbers are 224 MB and 121 MB respectively.
Edit: This might be an old (unfixed) issue https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6640430 ... This sucks because I have a specific doc and the calendar that I always keep open in pinned tabs. There are some other sites with seemingly quite high RAM usage as well. Well at least nothing is lagging so I guess I'll just chug on and see what happens.
Edit2: This behavior is just insane. I closed those two tabs and suddenly Gmail shoots up from out of the blue to 1.22 GB?! Then I reopen the two previous tabs (doc/calendar) again and Gmail stays the same while Calendar goes on a diet and sits at 187 MB (doc at 983). This is super weird. I'll just keep them open and see how it behaves overall, might just be wonky numbers?
I recently got an M1 mac myself and tried Safari out again -- I seldom used it on my 2016 Pro (preferred Firefox) but it's supposed to have stellar battery life, so why not give it a go?
Nice that they've got built-in tracking protection now, I guess, but I left Twitter running in a tab overnight and when I woke up Safari was reporting over a gb of memory use for that tab alone. Something in how they cache or handle JS for some of these long-running services, or maybe having to do with service workers ?, Safari just seems to consume a lot of memory. It's not a huge issue I guess, with the way the M1 never seems to have any memory pressure issues, but it's part of why I remember switching off Safari in the first place.
If anyone knows why Safari seems to consume more memory with these long-running processes, I'd be real curious to know why...
Battery life has been the reason for me trying it in the past as well.
And yeah I mean even though Activity Monitor is reporting high RAM usage I don't seem to have any memory pressure issues so it might not be that big of a deal (MBP 2015 w/ 8 GB RAM).
I'm actually considering getting an M1 myself next week. Have been waiting for the initial kinks to get sorted out and most apps ported to it and I think it's time now. :) SSD wear seems to have been resolved with the latest Big Sur versions and fewer Rosetta apps and now even ST4 beta has an M1 build.
My justifications are that I'll get an excuse to upgrade to 16 GB RAM and I'll get touch ID so I can have a more secure password and not have to type it all the time. And with the stellar performance and battery life of the M1 I can just keep using Chrome (Brave). :P
New tabs are opening in weird places, really faaaar to the right skipping between 6-7 (unrelated) tabs. Really cumbersome to navigate.
Horrible selection of extensions still. Really missing searching for any tab with Cmd+Shift+K (I often have ~100 tabs open across multiple windows) that I get with the Tab Switcher extension.
There's a Noscript equivalent extension but it costs $3...
And I can't initiate a search with "url bar -> you[tab]<searchterm>[enter]" (for a Youtube search).
Meh. Safari just doesn't work for me. Maybe if I sat down for a week or two and wrote a bunch of extensions myself but I don't see the value in that.
On the plus side Safari does seem snappy but then again I only have ~30 tabs open (across 6 windows) currently. So I might give it a win on speed but it definitely loses in overall usability.
Will try again in a year or so.
Edit: OH SHIT this is a definite dealbraker - apparently I can't select multiple tabs by Shift-clicking to pull them out into a new window. That completely kills my workflow of separating topics into different windows, and/or closing tabs in bulk.
Edit2: Wtf, how didn't I notice this earlier - I cannot see the URL when hovering over a link. How does anyone consider this within the realm of good UX?
