brian hefele's untidy space

Project Chromium for a Week was pretty uneventful. I got pissed off at the constant barrage of beachballs from Safari, and started The Project a few days ahead of schedule. Chrom(e/ium) works well enough, and I've stuck with it, even after the official end of The Project. Up until recently, your choice of web browser on the Mac was essentially Safari, Firefox, or Opera. There are also the antiquated IE for Mac and OmniWeb. In my opinion, all but Safari are completely laughable. Chrome is the first real competitor, in my opinion. Firefox is probably next closest - I know some are willing to put up with its joke of a UI in the name of extensibility and openness, but I am not. Chrome's UI is nowhere near perfect, but still much more pleasant to use than Firefox. Rather than write a lengthy essay on why I'm using Chrome for now, or why I might switch back to Safari some day, I figured I'd just throw together a quick pro/con list, and leave it up to the reader to prioritize.

Safari

• Native UI wins, hands-down. The beta of Safari 4 with tabs-on-top is even better, the best browser UI experience I've ever had. But even in its regressed state, it beats Chrome.
• Unstable like nobody's business. I'd say that I average 150 tabs open at a given time. Safari will start throwing beach balls upon opening a new tab. I also can't remember the last time I was able to cleanly exit Safari, it always comes down to a forced quit. However, it rarely fully crashes, just becomes a sluggish brute.
• Not extensible. This sort of thing I rarely care about, if I cared more, I'd probably use the horror that is Firefox. Still, all that exists for Safari is one excellent Flash-blocker, a variety of straight-up hacks, and a good ad-blocking http-proxy with rather inconvenient userscript/userstyle support. This isn't much of an issue right now, the only genuinely useful Chrome extension I'm using is a Flash-blocker that isn't as nice as the one for Safari.
• Bookmark Bar. I only use mine for bookmarklets, and for this it works perfectly. Cmd-shift-b, drag up bookmarklet, cmd-shift-b again to hide it, and everything is automatically assigned a cmd-# shortcut. Elegant.
• Google, only. No changing the search box.
• For that matter, a massive con that there's a distinct search box instead of a combination search/URL box. Waste of space, waste of time.
• Front page - Top Sites. This looks nicer and works better than Chrome's implementation of a similar feature. Yet Chrome's front page has more useful goodies - a temporary display of the bookmark bar, and a display of the most recently closed tabs. If you accidentally close a tab, you can easily open a new tab and navigate right back to your closed tab, history intact. This feature is nice, but the Top Sites type view is still rather lacking, as far as updating goes.

Chrome

• Nonnative UI means there are some glaring issues such as tab-close buttons on the right, an awful, awful decision. Awful. Inter-platform consistency always trumps cross-platform consistency in my book. System-wide dictionary support is also missing, making article-writing inside the browser a real bitch.
• Aforementioned nonnative UI means that aside from the obvious appearance issues, there are problems like this scrolling bug happening. Safari is made for Mac first, with the Windows version made as an afterthought. Chrome is simply made to be Chrome, although the order of release shows that Windows is the team's priority. If anything, I would expect that Linux would be their priority, for the sake of Chrome OS.
• Stable, quick. Doesn't render as snappily as Safari does, but that doesn't matter when Safari's throwing beachballs, trying desperately to give you a new tab. Overall, feels quicker and more fluid. Occasionally, mass quantities of tabs will apparently simul-crash, but the tab name still exists, and the site can easily be respawned with a simple hit of the refresh button.
• Tab management, as pointed out by my bud Nate, is a little strange. Safari stops displaying tabs when they start to become unreadable, and throws the excess tabs into a drop-down menu. Chrome keeps on adding new tabs forever, letting them shrink down into oblivion.
• Bookmarklets don't work very well. I use SuperGenPass and delicious bookmarklets regularly - neither works nicely under Chrome. Eventually, extensions will be able to handle this, but why replicate an existing method which should theoretically work? Extensions for SuperGenPass and delicious exist already, but suck.
• Search/URL bar rocks. It automatically adds search sites when you search on them. So if I go to flickr.com and perform a search, next time I type in flickr.com, I'm given the option to hit tab and search flickr from my search/URL bar. It's wonderfully implemented, easy to use. Search engines can easily be added manually as well.
• Multi-process approach. It's great, the Mac version still needs a process manager, because right now you just have to guess based on PID which of the many 'Chromium Helpers' is the one you need to force down. Safari now sandboxes Flash, which was the main cause of crashes anyway. I like the idea of multi-process better, but am not sure how necessary it is with other approaches available.
• Extensibility, as I already said, is not quite there yet. There aren't many great extensions. Hopefully we'll see Application Mode soon enough, which will eliminate the need for some of the (Wave, Reader, etc.) extensions that are out there, but merely tuck themselves next to the Search/URL bar, looking as much like an afterthought as an extension is (by definition, I suppose). Userscripts can easily be installed as extensions, which is nifty.
• Keychain support, definitely something that a Mac app needs. It works, but not quite as well as Safari - Safari will automatically fill in User/Pass, whereas Chrome wants you to type your User, and then it fills in the Pass for you. This kind of sucks when you don't remember your username for a given site…

Chrome is exciting to me, the first real competition in the Mac browser market that I've seen. Safari's been too much of a hassle lately with its constant barrage of beachballs. Apple's regression to the old-style tabs with no option to put them back on top really infuriated me as well. Here's a little comparison of how various browsers waste my screen real estate, just for kicks:

Left to right - Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Safari 4 Beta

Firefox is the worst space-hog, but only a pixel behind Safari. Chrome saves a bit of space along the way, but nothing can compare to the wonderful UI that was Safari 4 Beta. Anyhow, that's neither here nor there, except that a slick UI can make all the difference, and Safari chose to abandon theirs. In light of the stability and speed of Chrome, and only minor complaints, it's going to be the browser I stand by until something better comes along.