It has been a long time since I had last considered using an alternative browser to Safari. But when I got my hands on Google Chrome for Mac – My browser world was shaken.

Appearance

My grudge about Chrome on Windows was the ugly blue colour they chose. I love blue, but I don’t want a blue browser, that just doesn’t make sense. Thankfully the Mac version does away with the ugly blue and introduces the beautiful Mac chrome they all we love so very much. Although not the prettiest style, the tabs work very well sitting on top of the address bar as attempted by Apple in the Safari 4 Beta. The only difference is Chrome has enough space to drag the window separately to the tabs – Apple attempted to have all as one, which failed miserably. The address bar, bookmarks and navigation buttons aren’t anywhere near as nice as Safari and Firefox 3, but Google aren’t exactly known for their brilliant design skills. Google Chrome also has themes so if you don’t like the look, just change it.

Speed

Wow. They’re not lying when they say Google Chrome is the fastest browser ever. It is noticeably faster in all aspects, even compared to Safari. Pages load lightning quick and the javascript speed is brilliant. New tabs open virtually instantly and moving tabs around is a breeze. CPU usage is amazingly low which means it won’t hog your computers resources.

Crash Test

Well Chrome does crash a fair bit due to it being in Alpha. But the good thing about it is it’s crash handling. As each tab in Chrome is processed separately, meaning if a tab crashes the rest of the browser will continue to run fine. This is brilliant, now just fix the amount that the tabs are crashing…

Developer Features

As Google Chrome is based on webkit, you get the same developer inspector as in Safari. Anyone who has used Safari’s web inspector will know it is very comprehensive and can easily pin point any problems with your site, javascript or loading. I find it’s much better than Firebug in Firefox. The alpha version however does not allow you to view cookies yet which is a bit of an issue, but this will be introduced before the Beta launch.

Plug-ins

Google Chrome for Mac does not currently support plug-ins, but the plugins I want to talk about are the common plugins that come with the browser, Flash, Silverlight and Quicktime. 1 word, useless. Flash crashes at least once a day, usually more. Silverlight doesn’t even work – not a terrible thing, who uses it anyway? Quicktime barely works, and a lot of the time won’t work at all. This is a big problem for the browser, although it is forgiven as it’s just in Alpha.

Comparison

As I said earlier Google Chrome is a mash of Safari and Firefox. If you took Safari – improve it slightly. Add in things such as the ability to force new windows into tabs automatically (one feature that has been lacking in Safari for sometime), add themes etc. Then take that out of the blender, rework the way tabs are handled and processed, rework the way downloads are handled so you don’t end up with 50 windows open among other things, Google is a clear winner, especially in the Mac market.

Conclusion

Google, why have we had to wait so long for a Mac version, and a version that looks like it’s  a good 6-12 months from Beta? Your browser nothing short of what I’ve always wanted in a browser, yet I can’t really use it every day as it’s too buggy and is missing some crucial features. Most companies these days have caught on to the whole launch Mac + Windows software together, why have you not? I’m not alone on this one, just ask Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

We’re really not asking a lot. In fact we want to save them time and money in the long run. Microsoft needs to learn that it doesn’t need to do everything itself and open source projects such as Mozilla and WebKit are there for the taking. They just need to pick them up and they’re ready to go. What puzzles me about it all is it’s not a difficult thing for Microsoft to adopt one of these browser engines and build on them. They’re already more secure then IE will ever be, they work with WC3 standards and they don’t need to spend their money on developing something that seems like it will never actually be competitive with other browsers. They have the oldest and slowest browser on the market. See the results below from Peacekeeper.

They’re pretty dismal results, clearly the browser has passed it’s use by. There has been call outs everywhere for Microsoft to adopt one of the many browser engines yet they just flat out refuse to do it.

Internet Explorer is not the only product that they’re refusing to make web developer/user friendly and follow the standards. Outlook does not fully support CSS. Anyone who has ever made a HTML campaign with CSS will know how impossible it is to format and do the simplest thing without it looking like scrambled eggs in recent versions of Outlook. This inspired the wonderful fixoutlook.org. Back in 2000 they supported HTML now they’re using some terrible Word engine and for what? Here’s where I’m coming from, at what point do WORD and HTML even meet up. It doesn’t make sense. Why would you use a Word processor to render HTML? I don’t think this needs an explanation at all. It’s pretty straight forward, render HTML with a browser style engine, that’s what they’re built for.

So they say they’re listening, but I’m not sure that they are. The letter on this link doesn’t make sense. It shouldn’t even be a hard decision, support HTML, support standards. They’re there for a reason.

Feel free to have your say, I just wanted to share my opinion.

In September 2008 the iPhone’s browser share was at 0.32% according to Net Applications. It may not seem like that much of a share. But it’s safe to say, every iPhone owner has a desktop computer which they use to browse primarily however, when they’re out and about and want to check out your website, you’ll no doubt want them to be able to access that information. So even though the share isn’t huge, it is growing (it is a much higher share than Windows Mobile and its other competitors), and it is about providing your information on the go.

What’s great about the iPhone is it uses Safari as it’s browser and in my tests, if it works in Safari on your desktop it will usually work correctly on the iPhone. There is a few minor differences though, the main is the is not yet any Flash support. It is apparently in development, so hopefully we see it soon enough. I haven’t heard anything about it in a while though. Another problem is Safari on the iPhone will sometimes make your text bigger to be readable when zoomed out. This can sometimes mess with your design when you have designed it around a particular font-size to fit nicely where it is. The final problem is screen size. Most of the problems with the screen size Apple has already solved with the zoom feature. However that in itself can cause problems for sites that use things such as pop-overs, which can rely on accurate screen sizes for positioning, being zoomed in can play havoc with this.

The Verdict:

It’s time to start considering testing your sites in the iPhone, and perhaps if it’s a high traffic site even making an iPhone specific site designed specifically for iPhone browsing. The iPhone share in web browsing is growing and even though it’s not huge at the moment, it won’t be long before it gets close to 1%. The iPhone is worth taking notice of.

Browsing around I looked at various benchmarking results, some old, some recent to see how the browsers were fairing. Only they don’t seem to agree with each other, and using some in real life, browser that are supposed to be speedy are actually visually slower than the ones that are supposedly slower. None of it makes sense. On my search I found a few speed testing tools I could use myself, yet again, it didn’t add up.

One test I tried was benchmarking tool posted on Google. In the test apparently bigger is better… My tests came up as follow…

Safari 3 – 190

Opera 9.6 – 199

Firefox 3 – 208

Chromium – 2297 (Chromium is a port of Google Chrome Beta for Mac)

Given these results you’d think that Chromium was lightning fast compared to the others. In real use on a Javascript intensive site of mine, Chromium choked as did Firefox 3, however Safari and Opera were blazing fast. So I re-read the site because I was thinking maybe I misread. I didn’t, it still said bigger is better.

It’s got me thinking why? I studied the tests for about 2 minutes then I spotted a pattern in the ones that seemed to perform better. The test on Google ran 5 tests through 5 different test engine of different script sizes. Generally the browsers varied at speeds in each test, but there was some strange happenings with the browsers that scored highest. They didn’t seem to score so high in the big tests in comparison to the small test scripts. Here are my findings….

Safari 3 – 121 + 411 = 3.4x better

Opera 9.6 – 121 + 571 = 4.7x

Firefox 3 – 193 + 253 = 1.3x

Chromium – 2561 + 2984 = 1.16x

What this shows is even though the browsers may be faster at little jobs, once you start using intense Javascript some browsers tend to slow where as the ones that appear quicker in real use are the ones who’s performance increased compared to the initial shorter scripts. My theory is Safari and Opera are actually faster at more intense scripting, compared to Firefox and Chromium which are better at less intense scripts.

So after all that I think it’s safe to say different browsers perform differently depending on what the Javascript task it’s performing. If it benchmarks better it won’t necessarily mean better performance on your particular script. If all else fails do some tests!

NOTE: These tests were run on an iMac 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 2GB SDRAM running Mac OS X 10.5.5 with various tabs open in each browser. Test result will vary on different systems. Chromium shouldn’t be used as a benchmark for Google Chrome as the port is significantly slower than the real version of Google Chrome.

Opera Browser 9.6 although not quite there, shows Opera is finally getting the browser where it needs to be in order to be a real player. Design wise the new release is vastly improved, the Windows version is extremely sexy and it’s a shame they didn’t mix a similar design in for the Mac version. The Mac version is 1,000 times better than the old Mac version design but there are a few elements that are still “old style mac”.

Speed wise, Opera has really improved it’s HTML and image loading time, faster than Safari! Javascript is speedier than ever and I haven’t found any Javascript support issues which I have previously had in the past. I tested some of my intense Javascript sites in Opera and it held up really well. On par with Safari which is really good to see.

For developers it’s really important that browsers follow the web standards in terms of the way it renders HTML, Javascript, CSS etc. From my tests Opera seems to follow Mozilla with this, but with the speed of Webkit – The best of both worlds!

Opera also features a new developer console called Dragonfly which is similar to the Firebug add-on in Firefox. This is great news for developers wanting to test sites in Opera, it allows you to see any Javascript, CSS, HTML errors etc. Which as we all know helps dramatically when trying to combat various browser issues. It’s missing the network feature which both Safari and Firefox’s Firebug have. The network feature allows you to see how long each script and image takes to load which allows you to pinpoint exactly what is causing your site to load slowly. I have no doubt this feature will come shortly, Dragonfly is still only at version 0.7.

So is it time to switch? For me, not yet, I’ll be sticking with Safari for now. There are a few features missing that I’m accustomed to using such as the bookmarks bar at the top. Opera has a side bookmarks bar option, but I prefer it on the top. The design is not quite finished on the Mac version, it’s got it’s ugly bits and doesn’t have the flair of it’s Windows counterpart. I don’t think it will be long before Opera wins me over though, it’s moving in the right direction.

In this day and age where we are discovering the web was only so slow, not because our internet speeds, but because of the lack of browser speed. It is really important for browsers to be fast with 500 tabs open. It is also important a browser follows web standards *cough* Hint Hint Microsoft *cough*. Over the past few years we’ve seen the rise and fall of many web browsers. The real choices we have are Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer and now Opera, the new old kid on the block. As far as developers are concerned, another browser to take share from Internet Explorer is a good thing. Opera has launched a new word of mouth campaign to help give it a real share in the browser market. Visit Opera’s website for more details on that. You can view and share one of their “choice” viral videos. I hope this campaign works for them!