Chris WiegmanI tried, I really did.
While I’m ideologically opposed to Chrome for many reasons, this post isn’t about that. This post is about the fact that, for better or worse, Chrome is still the choice of my employer and is automatically installed on our work Macs.
For the last 6 months or so I’ve tried to make it work. I set it up to be as respecting of my privacy as I possibly could (a laughable goal but, that’s for another time) and tried to make it work as my browser to get me through my work day.
I failed.
For all the talk about how much progress Chrome has made, the fact is that it still fails completely when compared to Safari in terms of performance on Mac. I switched back to Safari this past week and was, once again, able to get about 4 hours of battery time on my work machine, enough to get through a solid block of focus time, without reaching for the charger. With Chrome I had been down to about 90 minutes.
It’s one thing to not understand just how horrible Chrome and Google are for your privacy. It’s another to kill the battery life on your laptop to let Google harvest all that data about you.
One day I’ll probably move back to Firefox again but, at least for now, I’ve actually come to really enjoy using Safari on this personal machine again. We’ll see how it stacks up after a few more weeks of work where most of what I use it for is editing Google docs and email.