Chrome vs Safari
Chrome and Safari are web browsers. They are supported by Google and Apple, respectively. Their layout engine, the part responsible for the look and feel of web pages as you view them, is WebKit. WebKit is an open source project built on code from the KDE community's "KHTML" and new code from Apple.
Chrome is a build of the open source Chromium project - so Chromium and Chrome are nearly identical. Safari is available free of charge but is proprietary (closed source) software.
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[edit] Crash Recovery
Chrome uses a separate process for each browser tab. Safari uses one process for each browser window. When a page crashes in chrome, typically only the individual tab it was in will crash. When a page crashes in Safari, usually the Safari browser window crashes.
Occasionally, all tabs in one window in Chrome will crash. Occasionally, when one window crashes in Safari, the browser must be shut down along with all browser windows.
Many of the crashes experienced in each browser are caused by problems in the WebKit engine. While the effect of a crash is not the same in each browser, crashes happen equally often in Safari and Chrome (approximately).
[edit] Performance
In practical terms, there is usually no noticeable difference in speed - a big part of each browser's performance is determined by the WebKit layout engine.
--This is not entirely true, as Chrome and Safari do have slight differences in their layout engine, and more importantly, Chrome has the overall fastest JavaScript execution while Safari has a relatively bad JavaScript engine. The V8 engine used in Chrome is almost consistently the fastest when compared to all other browsers. JavaScript execution time is especially crucial in HTML5 apps and games.--
[edit] Operating System
Chrome is available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OSX. Safari is available for Windows and Mac OSX. Also, the Open-Source version, Chromium, is available on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, and pretty much every operating system with a c compiler similar to GCC.
[edit] Interface
Chrome was designed to "wrap" around programs that run inside a web browser (be the "chrome" around web applications). It takes up a minimal amount of screen space for its own interface.
Safari uses a more traditional browser interface: its title bar, tabs bar, address bar, and menu bar (edit menu, tools menu, bookmarks menu, etc.) are separate, and take up a substantial amount of screen space. However, some users prefer this as it is easier to find items on the interface compared to the minimised interface which Chrome uses.