Apple's Safari-vs-Chrome Claims Rest on Prerelease Builds

Apple's new Switch to Safari page says Safari is up to 35 percent faster than Chrome at loading frequently visited sites and streams video for up to five hours longer on a Mac. Both figures come from Apple's own testing in August 2026 on prerelease software, according to the footnotes on the page.

9to5Mac reported the campaign on Oct. 12. It also includes two YouTube videos, on Distraction Control and Intelligent Tracking Prevention. Apple describes Safari there as "a more powerful and private browser than Chrome."

What the footnotes say about the 35 percent and the five hours

Footnote 1, the battery claim, used a 15-inch MacBook Air with an M5 chip and 16GB of memory. The Mac ran prerelease macOS "Golden Gate" and prerelease Safari 27.0. It played 1080p video on Wi-Fi with the display at eight clicks from the bottom.

The Chrome in that test was v151.0.7922.76. Apple's own footnote says battery life varies.

Footnote 3, the page-load claim, timed snapshots of 12 popular websites under simulated network conditions on the same laptop. The Chrome there was v151.0.7922.138, a different build from the one in the battery test. The page does not name the 12 sites.

1. Safari18.67 % of battery
2. Chrome17.33 % of battery

Source: Michael Tsai's blog quoting Matt Birchler, accessed 2026-10-14

Where the page and an outside test disagree

Blogger Matt Birchler ran the same kind of comparison in 2024 on a MacBook Pro after a clean reinstall of macOS Sonoma. Michael Tsai's blog quotes the result: Safari averaged 18.67 percent drain per three-hour test and Chrome 17.33 percent, about 9 percent less for Chrome. Chrome won five of six direct comparisons.

Birchler wrote that run-to-run variability was a caveat. In a later update he said controlled tests showed very close results, with Chrome using slightly less battery, and that nobody had sent him 2024 data showing Chrome was much worse.

That is one person, one Mac and an older Safari, so it does not refute Apple's M5 figure. A shader-hashing fix in Unreal Editor shows the same caution applies to any speed figure: its 12.90-to-1.59-second gain was summed CPU time across threads, not wall-clock startup. It does show the five-hour claim is an "up to" number from a single configuration, not a general property of the browser.

A benchmark footnote that lists hardware Safari cannot run on

Apple's headline calls Safari "the world's fastest browser", citing JetStream 3.0, MotionMark 1.3.2 and Speedometer 3.1. Footnote 4 says the values are rounded and that Safari scored higher on average against Chrome v151.0.7922.138, Edge v151.0.4129.78 and Firefox v153.0.4.

The hardware list for those tests includes an Intel Core Ultra X7 PC running Windows 11 Home. Footnote 6 adds Snapdragon 8 Elite Android phones. The same page says Safari runs only on macOS, iOS and iPadOS.

The page does not say which browsers ran on which machine, and it publishes no scores. Google's Gemini 4 Argon launch, covered here, had the same shape: vendor-supplied figures that no third party had reproduced at launch. The 12 sites, the raw timings and the per-benchmark results are all absent.

Claim on the page	Basis in the footnote	Left out
Up to 5 hours more streaming	One M5 MacBook Air, Chrome v151.0.7922.76	Number of runs
Up to 35% faster page loads	12 sites, simulated network	Site list, timings
World's fastest browser	JetStream, MotionMark, Speedometer	Scores, per-device results

What the comparison chart leaves out

The page's comparison table marks Safari "Yes" and Chrome "No" on all nine rows, including "Lets you hide annoying distractions and remembers your preferences" and "4K HDR video playback on Mac for YouTube, Netflix, and Apple TV." No row gives Chrome a pass.

Apple's Notify Me and Organize by topic features run on Apple Intelligence, which needs a recent device and one of 16 supported languages. Apple's footnote adds that some server-side features have daily usage limits.

Safari 27 and macOS Golden Gate were prerelease when Apple ran its tests, and 9to5Mac's report carries no response from Google.

For a reader weighing a switch, the check that matters is cheap: run the same 20 minutes of work in both browsers on battery and compare the percentage left. That is the test Birchler published, and the page offers nothing to stop anyone repeating it.