On my iMac, I’ve used the Chrome browser for many many years. This was an artifact of my using a Chromebook immediately after the 2015 break-in; it served as my primary computer for quite a while. Even after I got this here iMac, Chrome remained my preferred browser since I used it on both platforms.
Over that time, I’ve tricked out Chrome with just the extensions I want and I’ve gotten used to how it works.
With the arrival of the iPad Pro, I decided to give Safari on macOS another try. I believe in shaking up my routines now and then, and I wanted to see if using Safari made a difference.
I liked the Handoff of bookmarks between the macOS and iOS, and using Safari on the iPad is a great experience for me. I may try the Chrome iOS browser but feel no great need to do so.
However, Safari and I did not hit it off on the iMac. I was able to roughly reproduce my Speedial setup using Safari bookmark folders, but it felt clumsy to me. I did not notice that Safari was any faster than Chrome.
But what I really missed were the extensions and customizations. I am very used to the bookmarklets lining my Chrome toolbar to email a link to myself, run a site search, add a bookmark to Pinboard, and many other things. I could not reproduce this easily in Safari.
But the killer extension for me on Chrome is Video Speed Controller. Since videos now rule the web, and I tend now to do my at-home tech training via video rather than reading, I like the control of speeding up, slowing down, and skipping through a video with simple keystrokes. Not just on YouTube, either, most any HTML5 video.
I could not reproduce this functionality in Safari. And I did not see the sense in running Safari for everything except video when video is ubiquitous.
So I’ve gone back to Chrome on the iMac and feel much more comfortable. Thus endeth the experiment.
