Well, one thing about Safari is that upgrades seem to be tied to the OS. As a web developer, this makes testing things on different versions of Safari a bit difficult. Also, you have to upgrade the entire OS to get a new version of Safari, so if you were holding out on an OS upgrade you might be forced to upgrade if you need to test things on the latest version of Safari.

Did I miss something? I run Yosemite and the latest Safari, including point updates, runs fine. http://www.macworld.com/article/2987211/software-web/apple-r...

The alternative is that I need to have 30 versions of Chrome laying around because they update every week or two.

Surely there has to be a middle ground. :)

Well, Chrome tends to be ahead of the curve on a lot of things. For example, you need to upgrade to El Capitan to get true flexbox support in Safari (or iOS9 on iOS devices). This coupled with the fact that Chrome users don't need to do an OS upgrade to get the latest version means that you don't need to do as much heavy testing on various versions of Chrome (in my experience... though it's not in a locked-down corporate environment).

> Well, Chrome tends to be ahead of the curve on a lot of things

True. Memory/CPU/Battery-usage ist painfully high.

Better Performance? Even scrolling on bigger websites is sluggish at best. The only point of having chrome installed on my machine is because of it's DevTools... but I'm playing a lot with firefox Dev-Edition lately which seems to be superior here.

Many, perhaps most mobile Chrome users do not run the latest Chrome, and there's many differences among vendors. See http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2015/02/chrome_conti...

Mobile chrome users are almost exclusively on the latest chrome. There are a lot of other chromium-based Android browsers using out of date chromium, but if you touch a chrome icon to get to the internet its probably real, up to date chrome.

And at least on my site, most android users do seem to be using chrome rather than an OEM browser.

I have a three year old MacBook. I would like to use Chrome, but it brings my laptop to a crawl. Almost unusuable. I just figured it was my 4 gigs of RAM, and everyone was having a problem with Chrome?

You guys run Chrome with no problems? You must have more ram?

2010 Macbook Pro, 8 GB RAM, Chrome runs just great. Never believed I'd get this kind of longevity out of a laptop.

I have an old MacBook 4,1 (w/ Core 2 Duo), 4 GB RAM, lying around with the latest version of Chrome on it. It's usable, but not snappy, and you can't have dozens of tabs open or it will get sluggish fast. You have to clear the cache and restart Chrome too often.

My MacBook Pro is from 2012, but I have 16GB of RAM in it. I regularly have something like 10 windows with about 15 or so tabs in each. It can get bogged down at times, but generally works fine.

Chrome wants RAM, so I think that's the real blocker in your case.

Yes, I learned my lesson of thinking 4GB was good enough.

It's better to have 8GB minimum, but best of all to get as much ram as possible on a machine.

The extension "The Great Suspender" works wonders here; suspends tabs in the background when they've been idle, but you don't lose your place. It has singlehandedly made Chrome usable again for me, while simultaneously enabling my 40+ tab habit. 90% of the time you don't need the tab to be active, you just want it there so you can revisit later. (For me anyway.)

Another vote for The Great Suspender. It's literally a must-have for Chrome users.

I'm a tab maniac - 421 tabs open now. This wouldn't be possible without TGS (and 32GB RAM), and another extension called Tabli to index them all.

General computer buying rule: always buy as much ram as you can afford even if it seems like an insane amount at the time! One thing that drives me nuts about phones and tablets. I want to pay more money for more, more ram. Nothing impacts your devices life span more than the amount of ram.

I've found recent versions of Firefox to be surprisingly much zippier than Chrome and w much lower memory usage as well (especially w uBlock Origin).

I'm not an Apple user myself, but isn't what you describe something good for web developers as it ensures that your users can only have one version of Safari, as opposite to lots of older versions of Chrome, Firefox and IE?

No it's pretty bad for web developers - everyone stuck on old versions of Safari just since they don't want the new os (or sometimes are on services that aren't supported any more). Whereas there's not much difference between someone on chrome 43 and 46, and chrome auto updates aggressively so we can ignore anything < 40 easily.

Safari and IE are basically in the same boat of users being on old oses also being stuck on aging browsers. It's just that IE has been so much worse that we haven't had time to start complaining about Safari, but don't worry, that's coming very soon.

I hate ios safari with passion. Last release crashes a lot and it has the balls to blame the web page, so I have to run trough a lot of bogus crash bugs from users instead on working on real things.

I use iOS Safari all the time and have no crashes and it works just fine.

it's getting better now but still common enough. here's what it looks like

http://www.appledystopia.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ios9...

I'm aware of all those things. I have different priorities than you. This does not mean that I’m worshipping at the altar of Jim Steve Jones Jobs and lost the ability to think for myself.

How do I iMessage or FaceTime someone on an iPhone from my Android device? Do you just drop any friends that don't buy apple hardware?

As for FaceTime I think you're SOL. As for iMessage, you can just SMS/MMS text and it's well integrated into the Messages app on both my phone and Mac. My messages to you just appear green instead of blue.

Receiving SMS is usually free, even while roaming

There are ther messaging apps. I usually switch my green bubbles to skype or google hangouts

You install WhatsApp, like a billion other people.

you use one of the many alternatives

Chrome might not be the best, but Safari is very far behind.

http://nolanlawson.com/2015/06/30/safari-is-the-new-ie/

You're missing out. Google Photos is a revelation. But condemn the company for a product because absolutes are the best way to think.