The immense popularity of Google Chrome on macOS is quite an achievement for a non-default browser, but it’s understandable. In its early days, Chrome was known for being lightweight and fast. People said it was better than Safari and Firefox. This may have been true then, but it is not true now.
In fact, Safari outperforms Chrome on the Mac because it’s more energy-efficient, better at protecting your privacy, and it works seamlessly with the Apple ecosystem. Here are all the reasons why you shouldn’t be using Google Chrome on your Mac.
9. Chrome Offers More Power Than Safari
On a MacBook, you can see which apps are using a significant amount of power by clicking the Battery icon in the menu bar. If you have Chrome running, it will often show up here. Chrome is notorious for hogging RAM and draining battery on laptops. This problem is especially prominent when comparing Chrome to Safari, which has been optimized to work efficiently on Mac hardware.
Google is working on this issue, and has made some significant progress — Chrome outperformed Safari in some of our tests — but more often than not you’ll get better Mac performance using Safari.
And you don’t even have to take our word for it: Open Activity Monitor on your Mac, then go to the CPU, Memory, or Energy section. Open some tabs in Chrome versus the same tabs in another browser—Chrome will almost always use more power for the same task.
8. Chrome works its way
Unlike Safari, many of Chrome’s features have their roots in ChromeOS, as opposed to macOS. This leads to a less than ideal experience on the Mac as it means that Chrome works differently from other macOS apps.
For example, most Mac apps close immediately when you press Cmd + Q; Chrome, by default, holds the combo down for a few seconds before letting you quit (though you can turn that feature off by clicking Chrome in the menu bar and disabling the warning before quitting). Similarly, most Mac apps have their own preferences window; Chrome uses a website in a tab for that.
Chrome is also slower to catch up to new macOS features than Safari. For example, macOS Mojave introduced Dark Mode in September 2018, which Safari supported out of the gate. But Chrome didn’t follow the feature until March 2019—six years later.
The old information system was also a mess. Chrome used its own notification setup, which did not integrate with Notification Center on the Mac. Thankfully that’s not the case anymore, but for a very long time it was a huge pain.
Obviously, forcing a user to learn an entirely different workflow and user interface is less than ideal when they’re already used to one. Safari uses the same buttons and symbols as the rest of macOS, making for a more intuitive experience.
7. Chrome Extensions Come With a Price
It is true that in a head-to-head showdown of Chrome vs Safari, Chrome is the clear winner when it comes to extensions. It has a pretty decent library, and most of the extensions are designed with Chrome in mind since it’s such a popular browser. Still, such a large extension library comes with a price.
Extensions can present privacy issues, as many of them require extensive access to your browsing. Although there aren’t a lot of extensions to choose from with Safari, you can rest assured that what’s available has been inspected more closely than what you’ll find for Google Chrome.
And anyway, Safari has tons of great extensions. Sure, there aren’t as many as you get with Google Chrome, but what’s available includes all the main functions you’ll need.
6. Google is watching you more than Apple
While the interests of Google and Apple may seem to overlap, the companies’ structures are quite different. Google’s revenue is primarily advertising-based, which means that as a user, you’re not really the customer—you’re the product. Google makes money only when it can somehow get information about you to sell.
While you can tweak your Google settings to protect your privacy somewhat, you’ll never be completely secure with a company whose business model is based on getting your data. If that sounds a little Orwellian, then Chrome on macOS probably isn’t for you.
Unlike Google, Apple’s business model is primarily based on selling its hardware to you. Apple’s software is mostly free, but only to Apple customers, and only as valuable as it makes Apple hardware more attractive to the customer. The company has a more direct incentive to provide you with a browser that works well with other Apple products.
As a sign of this good faith, Apple regularly introduces new privacy protections for Safari.
