Safari, Not for Work
TL;DR - If you are using Google Workplace applications, then Safari isn’t for you. Duh!
My experiment to switch to Safari as my default browser at work failed.
The impetus for my experiment was two-fold:
- I couldn’t figure out a problem1 with Google Docs font size in a specific Google Chrome Profile.
- Google Chrome reader mode is crap. I love Safari’s Reader mode.
I switched to Safari, set up two profiles (Personal, Work), and imported my bookmarks.
The first issue I ran into is that you cannot separate bookmarks per profile. That’s not a big deal as you can organize the bookmarks into two folders: Personal and Work. Yet, your favorites aren’t by profile.
There are a number of other nits such as a list-view of the open tabs. However there will always be differences in look and feel. It is just a matter of getting used to it.
I missed search-keywords. I use them frequently to search directly in Jira or in Google Drive.
The bigger issues why I cannot use Safari at work relate to Google Workplace. This is not a surprise, though I expected better from Google. There are a number of issues:
- I frequently needed to reload Google Docs as it got stuck.
- Some features are not supported in Safari, e.g., paste from Markdown.
- Google Meet backgrounds aren’t supported in Safari.
- Some Google Cloud features don’t work in Safari.
I kept running into one after another. If you are using Google Workplace, then Safari is not for you. Duh.
I resolved the problem by not just deleting Google Chrome, but deleting ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome. My bookmarks and configuration were automatically restored through Google Synch.↩︎