Does Google Chrome display pages the same as Safari?

Question

Given that Chrome and Safari use webkit has anyone yet found anything that renders differently on Chrome than Safari? Is there any reason at the moment to test sites on both, or would testing Safari be sufficient for right now?

Answer 1

They are very similar, but not identical. For example, I remember reading that Apple put a lot of work in Safari to get Apple-style font rendering there, and I doubt Google duplicated that effort.

Answer 2

Google Chrome also uses an earlier version of Webkit than the current Safari, so pages should be checked in both browsers.

Answer 3

Part of this is knowing what is dependent on the rendering engine and what isn't. Javascript, for example, is handled differently in both browsers (google has their own custom javascript renderer), so if your page uses javascript substantially I'd test it in both.

This is probably a good place to note that Chrome has been added to BrowserShots so you don't even need to have it installed to test on it and Safari.

Answer 4

They still have different JavaScript engines, which might behave differently (propably only in some rare conditions, however).

Answer 5

They don't ship synchronized releases of WebKit. For example,

Google Chrome
Official Build 2200
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.30 Safari/525.1

versus

Safari
3.1.2
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; pl-PL) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.2 Safari/525.21

WebKit is very modular, so they have different drawing and javascript engines. Plugins are handled in significantly different manners as well.

In practice, I have not seen any site that acts differently, and the two browsers should have identical behavior, as far as any sane webpage is concerned. You could, of course, sniff the user-agent and force different behavior...

So no, there is no reason at the moment to test both. Keep in mind that Google does not have a stable release of Chrome yet.

Answer 6

Chrome is currently using a slightly older version of Webkit than Safari.

Over time it will be updated, of course, but there is the possibility that it will always be a little behind, depending on how Apple release their source.

In addition the Javascript engines are different, which may affect behaviour, although they're both extremely fast.

Answer 7

No. This would be a similar question to "Does Chrome Render the same as Konqueror", and altho the Webkit ( HTML Renderer ) versions may be different, the Java script engines are very different between Chrome, Safari and Konqueror. This will affect a lot of Google apps since they are written using javascript heavy stuff (AJAX). This also seems to affect a lot of modern sites, especially ones with complex menu's and editors ( such as this ). In the end it depends how much of the site you are viewing is written with javascript features.

Answer 8

No, and some specific UI differences include not rendering text-shadow and box-shadow the same between them. Same with border-radius. I'd avoid using these three (advanced) CSS rendering rules if you're working with Chrome.

Answer 9

FWIW, Google's Chrome FAQ says they should render very similarly:

• http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/webmasters-faq.html#useragent
• http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/webmasters-faq.html#renderie

Answer 10

Chrome and Safari have different font rendering on Windows. Safari includes Apple's font rendering which to a Windows user is a bit fuzzy-looking. On OS X, they both use the platform's native font rendering. So Safari looks like OS X on both systems, whereas Chrome looks like the platform it's running on.

This is in addition to other points mentioned by people who know more than I do. :)