Every Apple device I own seems to have four or five browsers. Tops on the list for Mac, iPhone, and iPad is Safari. Why? It’s blazingly fast at rendering pages and mostly gets out of the way and doesn’t require much tinkering (integrated search and URL window in iOS Safari would be nice).
Mozilla’s Firefox, Google’s Chrome, and Opera on the Mac compete with Safari usage, particularly Chrome. And I use Chrome and a few other interesting browsers on my iPhone and iPad. What is surprising to me is how beloved the iPhone and iPad version of Chrome is to many Apple customers.
What Chrome does well is integrate Google’s gotcha apps and sync tabs, bookmarks, passwords and more from one device to another. Amazingly, Safari does the same. The major difference between the two is rendering speed. Safari is blazingly fast, while Chrome lags (thanks to Apple making the better juice for their own iPad and iPhone browser).
If you like living in Google’s world (where you’re the product, not the customer), you’ll like using Chrome (even with that non-standard, goofy keyboard?).
Chrome is typical Google. Short on style and elegance, strong on clumsy usability, heavy into the Google tools tie ins.
To their credit, at least Google gave Chrome an Incognito mode for private browsing. Chrome’s tabs view is different than Safari.
Tabbed browser windows don’t work the same between Chrome on iPad and Chrome on iPhone, but at least you can see an image of the web site when browsing through open tabs (which is more cumbersome than tabbing in Safari, but does provide more visible tabbed pages).
Chrome for iPad features the more standard horizontal tabs at the top (which can quickly get lost as they shuffle together when more tabs are opened), but attempts to make up for it by providing flipping options on iPhone, and gesture swipes on iPad to switch tabs.
My biggest gripes with using Chrome, especially on the iPhone, is the clumsy interface, the obscure Clear Browsing Data option, integration into all things Google, and the web page rendering speed. Safari is simply faster, but even that speed difference is sometimes overshadowed by higher speed internet connections, especially when comparing iPhone downloads on 3G vs. 4G LTE.