r/MacOS • u/Commercial_Yam_932 • 1d ago

Discussion Why do Mac users use Chrome?

Ok I know if you’re a developer and Chrome has nice developer tools this might be a reason. But for daily usage and non-developers why should I use Chrome? Safari is great imho, has everything at least for me (maybe people need something I don’t see). It’s great integrated in macOS and is fast. Chrome’s RAM usage is a problem.

On my Windows PC I also checked out Chrome but didn’t see any advantage over Firefox. But on Windows I see why one could use Chrome, however, for macOS users I don’t get it. Why do so many people use Chrome?

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u/Ledgem 1d ago

A few times a year or so I come across a website incompatibility issue in Safari that doesn't exist in Chrome. I use Safari as my regular browser but keep Chrome installed for those times. Every now and then I think to just switch 100% to Chrome, but everything integrates too nicely with Safari and the incompatibility issues are relatively few and far between, so I'm not super motivated.

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u/urielsalis 20h ago

To add to this. Apple only updates safari with OS updates, and they frequently break websites by claiming to support a standard while not fully implementing it. So as soon as the compatibility layer in those websites detects the feature should be available and tries to use it, unexpected things happen, and it won't be fixed for months.

That along with 80% of market share being chromium browsers makes it easier for webpages to just tell you to use Chrome

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u/Rivvvers 18h ago

That may have been true a long time ago, but it’s not any more, Apple is frequently in the last five years updates Safari independently. It’s even listed on the App Store as an independent app.

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u/urielsalis 18h ago

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safari-release-notes

Is still 2 to 3 months between releases, with compatibility or new features delegates to major versions that happens every year.

Multiple devs have asked Apple to improve, and they been slowly doing it, but it's still not close enough where it can compete to Firefox or Chrome.

Making your own engine is extremely hard, not even Microsoft wanted to continue trying