Love Safari? These 8 reasons will make you consider a switch to Chrome

Should Chrome or Safari get your vote in the browser wars? Here are eight reasons to give Google's browser a chance.

- BY ALEX BLAKE

Apple users can be a pretty loyal bunch, often sticking to Apple-branded hardware and apps while giving third-party alternatives the cold shoulder. But sometimes it's worth looking outside the walled garden. For example, Google Chrome is immensely popular, taking the lion's share of the global browser market and dominating the competition. That’s not without good reason, and even if you've faithfully stuck with Safari over the years, you might be curious about what Chrome has to offer.

The answer, it turns out, is quite a lot. From an extensive arsenal of extensions to rapid security updates, there are plenty of reasons why Safari users should consider switching to Google's browser:

CHROME HAS BETTER EXTENSION SUPPORT

Extensions are the lifeblood of a web browser, helping to enhance its capabilities in ways far beyond the usual ones. If there's some sort of extra functionality you want to add to your browser, chances are there's an extension that can help you get it.

Chrome's market dominance in PCs means it's the main browser that extension developers build their web tools for. According to Chrome-Stats.com (fave.co/3G4xlTh), there were almost 156,000 extensions in the Chrome Web Store as of April, and while Apple doesn't publicly disclose the number of Safari extensions in existence, the number is likely to be much lower due to the smaller market share Safari has versus Chrome.

You can just look at the respective stores and see that you're spoiled with options in Chrome compared to other browsers.

Of course, you don't exactly need all 156,000 of those extensions to be running in your Chrome browser at once, but the sheer number of options means there's a greater chance of finding the extension that changes your browsing life.

CHROME SYNCS ACROSS ALL DEVICES AND PLATFORMS