Evan O.

I can’t believe I’m saying this. I switched to Google Chrome.

Over the past few years, I’ve stuck with the Safari bandwagon through several excellent Firefox releases, the Chrome beta, and a host of other browser options on the Mac. But finally last night, in a moment of shear frustration, I clicked the shiny Chrome logo that had been sitting lonely in my dock for several months. I had tried it before, but never long enough to really give it a chance. What changed my mind? I’d had enough of Safari’s memory leak.

If you don’t leave multiple browser windows open for extended periods of time, you might not realize that for years Safari has had a problem with a ballooning memory footprint. A serious problem. During ‘heavy’ usage (several windows and half a dozen tabs each), I’ve seen Safari take more than 700mb of memory. My system literally grinds to a halt. Of course I have much more RAM than that, but I’m USING it for the work I’m doing! I can’t afford to have my browser hoarding huge amounts of system resources. Quitting and restarting Safari will clear out its memory usage, but in a few hours, its back up again. I just can’t handle it any longer.

Chrome is fast, lightweight, and stable. In several days of browsing, I haven’t seen its memory usage top 150mb (with several windows and dozens of tabs). More importantly, closing windows reclaims the memory immediately.

Sure, Chrome has its annoyances. The keyboard shortcut for switching tabs is different and much harder to hit. The developer tools on Chrome aren’t quite as polished, but they work. In total though, there’s just not enough difference to make me want to go back to Safari’s headaches. Not now anyway.

I’ve always appreciated Apple software and I’m sure I’ll reevaluate my browser of choice when Safari 4.5/5 is released, but for now, I’m happy with Chrome! Congratulations Google…

Blogger just got rid of their FTP access feature, so I’m having to move off my server anyway. Guess I decided it was a good excuse to try Tumblr… something I’ve been wanting to do for awhile anyway.

So far so good! I’m loving the simplicity.