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What Brit watchdog redacted: Google gives Apple cut of Chrome iOS search revenue

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Kind of...but not really.

Safari and Chrome on MacOS both use Webkit (as far as I can tell) whereas Chrome on other platforms uses Blink. So on MacOS Chrome and Safari are very similar, but compared to other platforms Chrome and Safari are very different.

This may have changed since I last cared, it's possible Chrome on MacOS now uses blink.

Either way, Safari definitely benchmarks faster than other browsers on MacOS...but it doesn't behave the same way. To me it feels a bit like the old Internet Explorer / Netscape days where everything would render perfectly on third party browsers, but for some reason would be shit on IE...or it worked perfectly on IE but not anything else.

There is also the system fonts to take into account, Apple has some system fonts that are stubbornly different from other systems. For example Windows and Linux have interchangeable system fonts with basically the same widths etc...which means if you design something with those system fonts, your design will appear more or less the same across both platforms. Whereas with Apple, it can put your whole layout out of whack if it's a tight design.

I'm not sure if this is still the case, but Safari used to use a different Javascript compiler which could cause problems to occur. I think Chrome uses a compiler called V8 and Firefox uses SpiderMonkey whereas Safari (as far as I can recall) uses something called LLVM.

To give you an idea of which Javascript compiler is probably the best, SpiderMonkey is used in various database technologies such as MongoDB and CouchDB. V8 is used with NodeJS and LLVM is used nowhere other than in Safari.

Which browser is the best? Well that is subjective, but objectively it isn't Safari.

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