Apple has a newish Switch to Safari website and a couple of YouTube videos. Something about the website especially feels off to me. I’m being picky here, but what’s the point of writing articles about Apple if you can’t be picky every once in a while?
“Safari is a more powerful and private browser than Chrome” is the tagline. I get what Apple is saying, but “more… private” sounds funny to my ear. I also don’t think “more powerful” means what Apple wants it to mean here, because the first big point Apple makes is that Safari uses less power when it comes to maintaining battery life.
I’m not sure what Apple should say instead, to be fair. “Safari is a better browser than Chrome” is blah. “Safari is a friendlier browser than Chrome” doesn’t mean anything. But “more powerful and private” is an odd phrase to me.
The next tagline on the page is “Safari succeeds where Chrome trails.” That’s another very odd sentence to me. To use a too-common insult these days, it sounds like an LLM wrote it.
The next graphic, though, works for me. “Safari sips; Chrome slurps.” When you’re on a laptop, battery-guzzling apps are a problem. I like calling out the disparity.
Apple then uses some iffy animations to promote its claims that “Safari cuts the clutter while Chrome piles it on”. (I don’t think this one’s fair. Chrome doesn’t add extra crap to websites, in my experience.)
I’m fine with Apple’s claim that “Safari shields you while Chrome reveals you,” though internal rhyme is never my favorite.
Then the next one says “Safari blazes; Chrome cruises.” I don’t think those are opposites, and the rabbit with a snail shell is a weird image to me. And even Apple’s explainer text — “Safari is up to 35% faster than Chrome when loading frequently visited sites on Mac” — feels heavily caveated.
Then comes the chart, which is fine. Though I’ll admit I first misread “Fights tracking with machine learning” as relating to tracking fights, which I’ve never needed to do. I’m not a boxing or MMA fan.
After a few more chunks of marketing copy that I think is pretty well done, there’s a list of questions. Where every other website would call this a FAQ, Apple headlines it: Questions? Answers. Okay.
The very first one is “Is Safari better than Chrome?”, which again, feels very off to me. We’re on apple.com, the whole page is promoting Safari over Chrome, and we know Apple’s stance here. It feels a little… desperate?
I’m a Safari user. I prefer it to Chrome. There’s some cute stuff on this page. But it definitely also feels odd.