I’ve noticed more and more of the bloggers I read prefer Chrome over Safari (the two I remember off the top of my head are MG Siegler and Justin Williams.) So last month I decided to give it a try.

In general, I like Chrome better. However, I switched back to Safari after a few weeks because of one problem: bookmark syncing. With Safari’s use of iCloud, I can add a bookmark at home, work, on my laptop, on my iPad, or on my iPhone and it shows up on all of them. Chrome can’t do this.

I’ve never taken well to multitasking on the same computer, mainly because I hate having to switch my app windows around. It was great with Snow Leopard since I would make a space for each task I was working on. But with the “upgrade” of spaces in Lion, that no longer works for me. Since the spaces no longer stay in the same order when I use the keyboard to navigate them, that workflow broke for me.

My solution has been to multitask with multiple devices. When I’m at my desk, I’ll always have an iPad open so I can refer to a book, website, or wikipedia article. When I’m working in bed, I’ll have two iPads and possibly my laptop. In that situation, bookmark syncing is critical.

Other than that, I have a number of smaller problems with Chrome:

• History Menu: chrome’s is 100% useless. My bookmark bar has the most visited sites (duhh, who would frequently visit a site and not bookmark it?). Recently closed isn’t that useful, either. Safari gives you date-organized menus with days worth of history. Awesome.
• Bookmark Menu: Why the hell do I want the menu to contain the exact same bookmarks visible in the bookmark bar? Why are my other bookmarks hidden away at the bottom of the bookmark menu. Chrome has thrown over 10 years of muscle memory out the window for no good reason.
• I hate the title bar. I feel like there isn’t enough space in the Safari one, and I personally hate any window without a proper title bar. I hate when things don’t follow the HIG. Hell, I still don’t understand why anyone would want to theme any program or even use a desktop picture. I want 100% consistent UI in every program (fullscreen games being the only exception.
• Autostart of videos in background tabs. If there are multiple links on a page I want to follow or I just want to look at one of them later, I open them in new tabs. With YouTube search results I might open 10 tabs I want to look at. And Chrome will start playing them all as fast as possible. Stimpy, you idiot!!

Yes, there are plenty of bad things about Safari and good things about Chrome. I particularly like Chrome’s tabs much better. But without addressing bookmark syncing, Chrome has no chance of being my default browser. And yes, I’ve looked at Xmarks. But it requires an installer and I refuse to run it. If a add-on/extension works in Chrome and Firefox, it should work in Safari.

I don’t even require full-sync like Safari does with iCloud. As long as Chrome can sync with the desktop Safari bookmarks, Safari will take care of iCloud. Hell, at a minimum, let me reimport bookmarks skipping duplicates. Or let me export my chrome bookmarks to Safari’s (i.e. Other Bookmarks -> Bookmark Menu).

Chrome, you tempt me. But I gotta stick with Safari.

An interesting issue noted by Dave Winer via Daring Fireball:

Why does Twitter work better for news than Google Reader? Simple, Twitter gives you what’s new now. You don’t have to hunt around to find the newest stuff. And it doesn’t waste your time by telling you how many unread items you have. Who cares. (It’s like asking how many NYT articles you haven’t read. It would be gargantuan. I don’t bother you with the number of Scripting News posts you haven’t read, so why does Google?)

I have to respectfully disagree on this. I look at news, and particularly RSS feeds, as something I don’t want to miss. So the unread counts are very important to me for what I consider my top tier feeds. I don’t want to miss any entry in certain feeds. Just like when I read a newspaper or magazine, I’m going to look at the headline for every story. Maybe it is something to do with being trained as a journalist.

News to me is important. And 99% of the time it is written. I don’t watch TV. I don’t listen to the radio. I hate sound bites. And what else is Twitter but sound bites for the Internet? Or chat? I guess that’s why I’ve never even signed up for twitter until this month, and that’s because I needed to use it to register for a couple of websites (which should really use OpenID instead).

I can’t fathom getting news via Twitter or only wanting the newest stuff. You’ll miss out on lots of important stuff if you are incommunicado for a few days or even a week (like when I just moved). I was without Internet access for over a week, leaving on Sept 1. So if I just used tweets for news instead of RSS, I’d know nothing about Ping, the new iPods, the change in the iOS developer license, etc.

IMHO, Twitter is for Paris Hilton, Justin Bieber (whoever that is), and as a group replacement for instant messaging. Same for TV News. I prefer RSS and old-school journalism like The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, Mother Jones, and Bill Moyers. Twitter is the USA Today of online news.