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Comment by pavs | Hacker News Reader

Safari has bigger issues than rendering engine. (at least for me)

I don't even have to open a website, just open a new tab and its starts beachballing just to load the new tab. Also extensions are a big part of my browsing experience. Safari doesn't have large extension community like firefox and Chrome.

Simply put, for me, chrome is more than its rendering engine. Overall its just a well rounded piece of software with very frequent updates, which is very unique among browsers.

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Do you have top sites enabled? That's a comically inept botch (loading a 300MB image pack?) but with it disabled the difference versus Chrome is pretty minimal - it's mostly down to Chrome's ability to segregate CPU-hungry apps at that point.

This is 100% the case, switching your homepage to about:blank (or ANYTHING other than top sites) makes the browser feel new again.

Yes, I had top sites enabled. However, as I mentioned somewhere else, I just checked safari for the first time since the last update and the beachballing problem seems to be gone now. Safari overall seems much more responsive.

In addition, there is a defaults command to disable web snapshots in Safari (for Top Sites, history, etc). This can save considerable amounts of disk and bandwith if you don't use the graphical previews.

    defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSnapshotsUpdatePolicy -int 2

If what you say is true (beachballing when open a new tab), you've got some serious issues particular to your system.

I agree. People always seem to bash Safari in discussion boards, and I always read these comments a bit confused. I've used Safari full-time for the past 2.5 years, and I've never once had a problem.

I downloaded Chrome and didn't notice anything significantly different than Safari (other than the strange-looking tabs, from the standpoint of someone used to Safari), so I shrugged my shoulders and deleted it.

I'm not saying Safari is a superior browser. Just that it has always seemed perfectly fine to me.

Now that you mentioned, I realized that I didn't use safari since the last large system-wide update (I think it was in the last 2 weeks or so, 10.6.3). So I tried it now and I can't replicate the beachballing problem, Safari seems much more stable after the recent update.

On an unrelated note, firefox on mac is a really sorry case. I hope this is not only on my system.

FF on Mac is terrible for me too. I switched to Chrome recently and the difference is shocking.

It's not just you. FF on Mac's only redeeming quality is Firebug. Pity the WebKit inspection/debugging tools are so awful still.

Perhaps my requirements are much less demanding than yours, but I find the Safari develop tools to be more than adequate. Quite like them, in fact. Which aspects were you finding to be awful?

I've find the debug tools in the WebKit nightlies to be more polished and just as capable as those offered in Firebug, without the jank of Firefox on the Mac. What specific features are essential to your workflow that WebKit doesn't offer?

I hate to repeat it, but it's really true. Firebug makes it so easy to debug CSS due to the saneness of the CSS UI. WebKit's inspector UI is a nightmare for tracing a CSS calculation.

I wouldn't call it a nightmare, its just not as good as firebug yet but made major improvements over the last year or so. If there was no firebug today than I Web Inspector would be the second best choice. Their CSS editing and tracing needs to be a bit more intuitive, not a fan of clicking check boxes to remove CSS element.

I wouldn't call them awful; they only seem that way in comparison to the awesomeness that is FireBug.

What's wrong with it? It works great for me. Memory usage seems like it might be a little higher, but it's well worth it for the extra add-ons and configurability.

Memory usage is higher, it generally feels a little bit slower than Safari or Chrome, and it takes a ridiculous amount of time to launch. I skipped Safari entirely when I first got a Mac because I was used to FF on Windows. I tried out Safari after a friend suggested I do so. I've since moved to Chrome as my primary browser, but there was a buggy release (for me) that caused me to switch back for a while. I now try to avoid opening FF unless I absolutely need something in Firebug or the Web Developer Toolbar.

One plus to Chrome is the integrated search/URL bar, also. I've gotten so use to using the same bar for both, that I've had issues using other browsers when they try to visit some site that's actually my search query.

Firefox still has a place on my system, but it's definitely not something I want to use all the time.

I was just going to say that. I had similar performance problems with Safari, especially when opening the Top Sites view. After the latest Safari update, however, I see none of those problems.

I would be very surprised if Apple took the time to re-write the rendering engine but didn't also work on the UI. I suspect that when this new rendering engine launches, it will probably wrapped in a UI that copies most of the innovations of Chrome (and hopefully improves on them) in the same way that Chrome took a lot from others.

On Mac if I need to have lots of tabs open (which I do when I visit photoline.ru and want to see all the photos of the day: I just click on thumbnails to open them in background and then go through them. Sometimes it resutls in several hundreds of tabs, weird I know) Safari handles that much better than Chrome. Chrome is my default browser, but I swtich to Safari just to browse said site.

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