5 Reasons To Switch To Safari NOW

For the past few years, IE has been shunned by web savvy users, and especially the web dev community, for it’s lack of innovation.  Firefox had become the standard for web dev.  But recently, with the release of Chrome and it’s massive performance improvements and greater web standards support, along with extension support, serious devs and web power users have begun to move away from Firefox and use Chrome.  However, one browser that has been neglected is Safari.  Even though it has had dominant speeds until the most recent release of Chrome, not having extension support has hurt it’s overall appeal.

Now that’s all about to change.  With the release of Safari 5, Safari is now the fastest browser out there, and with all the new compelling features, I believe the browser that you should start using today.  I’m going to delineate the case for Safari below, and why I think anyone using the web should be using this browser.

#1 – Speed

A few months ago, Chrome was the fastest browser for PC/Mac, bar none.  Now, with the release of Safari 5, Safari has now taken that title.  Here are some quick specs, which Apple has made nice charts of here. Here’s the breakdown, with approximate percents of how much faster Safari is than comparative browsers:

HTML Rendering (I-Bench):
Chrome: ~58% faster (eg Safari is 58% faster at rendering pages than Chrome)
Opera: ~177% faster
Firefox: ~227% faster

Javascript Rendering (I-Bench):
Chrome: ~75% faster
Opera: ~88% faster
Firefox: ~537.5% faster (WOW!)

2.  Reader

A lot of people love reading articles on the web, and let’s face it, sometimes websites can be a cluttered place. Not only does Safari have built-in RSS, it has a great new feature called Reader, which essentially turns a web page into a sheet of paper, which eliminates Ads and other nuisances when you are trying to read an article. Safari does the legwork for you, all you have to do is click the ‘Reader’ button on the URL bar, and it will only appear for supported sites. How will this affect the web? Well since user is king, it’s a great move, but at the same time it could seriously affect revenue of blogs and other ad-dependent sites.

3.  Extensions (FINALLY)

Safari supports extensions. They are making an official extension gallery, which is currently taking submissions, but there are other sites with a ton of Safari extensions that devs have released already. They still need a solid web developer add-on to rival Firefox, but I’ve read that that is in the works. Here are some current extension indexes:
Safari Extensions
Pimp My Safari
Safari Extensions – Tumblr Blog

4.  Web Standards

Safari supports a ton of HTML5 and CSS3 properties, including canvas, API for media playback (sans Flash, YAY), location services, captioned video, and more. Plus, Safari is one of the few browsers (Chrome too?) to score 100/100 on the Acid3 test. Download a copy of Safari and head on over to Acid3 to see for yourself!

5.  Web Dev

Safari’s internal web inspector is awesome, think Firebug except native and with more resources (thank you webkit). Plus, it has a slick Develop and Debug menu, with user agent spoofing, stylesheet/javascript/etc toggling, rendering page as different browser, and other goodies for you to check out. Since Chrome uses webkit as well, Safari and Chrome have very similar web inspectors, but I think Safari has a more diverse Develop/Debug menu.

Bottom line, Safari now has all the tools you need to experience the web in the fastest, most accessible, and most streamlined way. If you haven’t used Safari yet, be sure to check it out, you can download it here.