“If you want the fastest browser then the browser you should be using on your Mac is Safari,” Adrian Kingsley-Hughes writes for ZDNet. “It won two of the benchmark speed tests, while Chrome only won the one. Pretty clear win for Safari.”
“If you want the browser displaying the best standards compliance, then go with Chrome since it was the winner in the HTML5 test,” Kingsley-Hughes writes. “Moving from the artificial world of benchmarks into the real world, I have to be honest and say I can’t feel much of a speed difference no matter which browser I use. Even running something like Internet Explorer or Edge through on a virtual machine on the Mac doesn’t feel all that bad to be honest.
“No matter which browser you use, they’re all pretty darn fast,” Kingsley-Hughes writes. “But if you want to be running the fastest browser on your Mac, run Safari.”
Check out all of the benchmarks in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yes, the fastest web browser for Macintosh is Apple’s Safari.
… oh and if you value battery life, run Safari.
… and without Flash installed
And when you need flash..just choose iOS as a user agent and you can bypass flash for most sites that default to flash for videos.
How do you change user agents?
Go to SafariPreferences, enable the Develop menu. You’ll find the option in Develop: User Agent.
You first need to enable the Developer Menu. Go to the menu Safari>Preferences…>Advanced and click on “Show Developer menu in menu bar”.
Then, go to the Developer>User Agent sub-menu and select any of the iOS devices as your User Agent.
Voila, HTML5 only – no Flash!
Cheers,
dmz
Safari is much better integrated with other aspects of my Mac and IOS devices, so even if it were slower, it would still be a preferable choice for me. Being faster and better integrated makes it a very clear winner.
That’s what they said about Internet Explorer, and that models stinks. It’s pathetic that Apple relies on Safari cookies in order to allow iTunes to work correctly.
… yeah, go ahead and try to find that in the user documentation that Apple gives its users.
There are differences between browsers and it’s not just interface. If Apple really did care about user experience, it would not force users to have Safari at all. Let the user choose what browser works best for his needs.
I use Safari until it fails. Then I switch to Chrome to get the task done. Then I’m back to Safari.
Using Chrome for a split second is enough for Google to download all yout info. You might as well use it all the time.
Eww Gads man!
Delete that Froogle crap off your machine asap.
There are so many other choices or backup browsers to try… why why why on earth would you ever use that?
It has recently become a problem, yet again as in the olden days, to use just one web browser. There is no single perfect web browser. NONE of them are perfect at everything. As per the olden days, they’ve diversified to the point where you MUST use only certain web browsers on certain pages. I hate that!
Thankfully, WebKit is commonly considered the standard, despite all the diversity going on. That means any browser using WebKit is likely to handle most web pages.
In order of usage, I end up using:
Safari
Firefox (including the Tor browser)
Chromium (to hell with Chrome)
iCab (I often use it on iOS, second to Dolphin)
OmniWeb (Yes, it still lives, barely. It still has some lovely unique features I like).
I have Opera and Vivaldi kicking around but never really bother with them. There are even more web browsers still limping along, but I have found them worth avoiding for various reasons.
AND here are the two most popular web browser test pages:
The Acid Test:
http://acid3.acidtests.org
The HTML5 Test:
http://html5test.com
The fastest but you won’t be able to tell the difference. Sure. If you say so.
Why does safari constantly refresh a webpage twice after a few seconds? Especially annoying when entering a password and it pops off.
On my MBP, Safari will “refresh” the page, and show me my bookmarks list.
Thats all I have ever used. Has the features I want and is a basic web browser without bloat!
I use all of them
I am web developer
But safari is my main personal browser