I’ve been using Safari since its introduction in 2003.  Upon the death of Internet Explorer for Mac, I switched to Safari exclusively.  When other web browsers have come out, I’ve given them all a go, but I’ve always returned to Safari.  Until now: Safari 5.1 has forced me to switch to Chrome as my browser of choice.

Safari 5.1 now behaves more like Safari on iOS.  When Safari decides that you haven’t interacted with a page recently enough, it unloads that page to save memory.  This doesn’t match up with my usage of Safari in any way.  I often have several tabs open.  Those tabs represent a to-do list of sorts.  Some of the open are items that I simply want to read.  Others represent an action that I need to take: fill out a form, write a new blog post, write my weekly status report.

Forced reloading breaks every single one of these to-dos.  In the best-case scenario, the webpage that I’m reading hasn’t changed between when I started reading it and when Safari forces a reload of its content, so I haven’t necessarily lost anything other than my place on the page.  Even so, I lose the context of what I was reading, and I also lose the time necessary for the page to reload.  Occasionally, I lose the content of the page, if I’m offline when I’m trying to read the page but a forced reload has occurred.

In the cast of an action to take, the forced reload is even more irritating.  I lose my work: the partially-filled-out form, the incomplete blog post, the status report that I forgot to commit to the wiki.  At minimum, I lose the time that I invested in my half-finished work.  Recreating that work is always a losing proposition.

I tried to live with Safari 5.1 for a few weeks.  Slowly, I found myself trying out other browsers again.  I tried Firefox again, but its inability to respect my system proxy settings¹ and its incorrect handling of keyboard shortcuts like option-arrow² have made me move to Chrome.  I’m not sure if I really like Chrome yet, but it doesn’t break my workflows, and I don’t have the constant concern of losing my to-dos.

If a future update to Safari changes this behavior, I might try it again.  But Safari has really broken my trust with 5.1, and I don’t think that I’ll come rushing back.