Google+ is already popular, and it isn’t yet showing any signs of slowing down. If you’re already in, or if you’re eagerly awaiting an invite, there are a few ways you can improve the experience when accessing Google’s new social network from Mac and iOS devices.

Mac

Create a Google+ Mac app with Fluid. Earlier this week I talked about the newest version of Fluid, which lets you create full-screen web apps for Lion using specific websites. Even if you don’t have Lion, Fluid is a great way to create a Google+ application that looks and feels more like a native Mac app than a website. You can even grab a nice Google+ icon to use with your Fluid app, like this one from deviantart user KillaAaron.

Better interaction with bookmarklets and extensions. You can change how Google+ looks and how it behaves with custom extensions for Chrome and other browsers. Go2Web20 has a great list of some of the best tools out there. One of the best is a +1 extension that lets you save any web page you come across to your +1 list in Google+, but that specific link on the Go2Web20 site is currently broken, so check out this similar option from the Chrome web store instead. If you’re not using Chrome, you can grab this bookmarklet for +1 recommendations that should work with most other browsers.

Import your iPhoto albums with Picasa for Mac. You’ve got a lot of iPhoto events, and now you want to share those photos on Google+, which actually has a great photo viewer. Apple has built Facebook support into iPhoto, but obviously there’s no direct method for getting that content to Google+. But with Picasa’s free native Mac app, you can import your iPhoto content and share it to your Picasa Web Albums right from your desktop. Depending on your sharing choices, the pictures will be visible in your Google+ galleries.

iOS

Use third-party Picasa apps to upload your photos. There’s no instant upload for iPhones and iPads as there is for Android devices. But you can get your photos from your mobile to your Google+ account without having to upload to a computer first. Just choose one of the available iOS Picasa photo uploading tools, like Web Albums, and then upload the pic you want to share to a public gallery on Picasa. Once you’ve done that, navigate to the photo in the Google+ mobile browser app and comment on the photo to share it to your stream.

Bookmarklets for sharing. For sharing sites and saving content to your +1 list, bookmarklets that work with mobile Safari are your best bet. The one I mentioned above should work for your iOS devices, too.

Share from desktop to mobile. You can use Google+ as a handy way to quickly share links between your desktop and mobile devices, by adding an email address that you have registered on your smartphone to one of your sharing circles on Google+. So, for instance, you could create an iPhone reading list and re-share interesting links in your Google stream to a specific circle called “for iPhone” that just contains your own email address, or you could set up a circle with the email addresses of your coworkers or project team for easy forwarding of interesting links and notes.

Google+ will likely improve as it iterates, and it will offer even more avantages for Mac and iOS users, especially when (and if) Apple approves the official Google+ iOS application. But even at this early stage, I’ve found that it enriches my computing experience on any Apple platform. Any advice you can add based on your own use of Google+?

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Apple’s App Store is a huge success, and it’s ironic that the introduction of native apps came largely at the behest of iPhone owners, who were dissatisfied with the company’s initial policy of only allowing third-party software on the platform via web apps. Web technology has made great strides since then, and HTML5 makes it possible to recreate rich-media effects without resorting to Flash, which is too resource-hungry for most current-gen mobile devices, and is barred from iOS devices. But despite advances, web apps have yet to prove themselves as a viable alternative to local native software. The Chrome Web Store, for example, powered by Google, hasn’t shown any signs of real success, and in fact, some have suggested it’s quite the opposite, including developers actually selling in the store.

Facebook does bring a built-in audience of 700 million users to the table, so it has that going for it. And a decent chunk of those users partake in social gaming from developers like Zynga, the makers of FarmVille, on Facebook’s desktop web platform. But Farmville, and many other social games that use in-game currency to make most of their money, have already found a profitable route to mobile thanks to Apple’s App Store. A Facebook offering might immediately appeal to some of these developers (the social network allegedly has 80 involved in the initial Project Spartan launch), but to prove a viable alternative in the long run, Facebook will have to either offer a better value proposition to devs (by giving them a bigger cut) or show that developers can reach more users than they do with native offerings.

For a store that resides entirely on the web, that’s a tall order, because it means convincing mobile users to shift their idea of what constitutes mobile software once again. It’s hard to understate how different it is to ask mobile users to pay for an application, versus asking them to pay for access to what basically amounts to a website. Facebook web apps will apparently carry a “Facebook wrapper” with basic Facebook functions and access to Credits, Facebook’s virtual currency, but it won’t change the fact that it’s a web page you’re looking at. To mobile users who have embraced the app store model, this will likely feel too much like backsliding.

I’m not at all of the opinion that mobile apps will ever replace the web, but I think we’ve also reached a point where web apps will never replace native ones. And Facebook, which still doesn’t treat the iPad as a mobile device, despite the fact that it has much more in common with the iPhone than with any PC, isn’t going to change that.

Apple may not understand the social web, as undertakings like Ping demonstrate, but it did seem to acknowledge that by partnering with a company that does when it introduced Twitter integration in iOS 5. Facebook, on the other hand, seems to have a blind side when it comes to monetizing mobile users, and Project Spartan is just another sign that it isn’t going to “get it” any time soon.

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Flash 10.2 requires an Intel Mac with a 1.33 GHz Core Duo processor or better, at least 128MB of graphics memory, and OS X 10.4 or above. Supported browsers are Safari 4, Firefox 3, Chrome 2, and Opera 9.5 and above. According to Adobe, a two-year old Mac mini used less than 8 percent of the CPU playing “smooth full HD 1080p video.”

That sounds like it would be a Mac mini using the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M. Conveniently, I have a unibody 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook with the same integrated graphics solution, so I looked forward to a precipitous drop in CPU usage when playing HD video with Flash. To my surprise, I got it; not 8 percent, but 16 percent playing 1080p video, which is still a big improvement from punishing CPU usage of the past. Unfortunately, the same could not be said of a MacBook Air from 2008 using Intel GMA X3100 graphics card. Even taking into account the difference in CPUs, the same video used 125 to 150 percent the CPU usage of the 1.6GHz Core Duo machine.

The takeaway here is that if your Mac supports hardware acceleration for Flash, Flash 10.2 can provide real gains in performance and better battery life for mobile Macs. Those using Flash 10.1 can test their performance before and after upgrading using test videos from Adobe. It should also be noted that performance gains won’t materialize unless websites update to take advantage of Stage Video, but some sites, like YouTube, already have.

For those who don’t want to tolerate Flash ads, there’s always the blocking plug-in ClickToFlash for Safari. For those with Macs that can’t take advantage of hardware acceleration in Flash 10.2, or for those who just hate Flash, there also a “dual browsing” option. Get rid of Flash on your operating system, use Safari or Firefox for normal browsing, and just use Chrome (which has the plug-in built-in) when you absolutely need Flash.

Steven Frank explains how to remove Flash from Safari. In both your root directory and your home directory, go to “/Library/Internet Plug-Ins” and remove “Flash Player.plugin,” “flashplayer.xpt,” and “NP-PPC-Dir-Shockwave,” (if it’s there). You can create a folder for them like “Internet Plug-Ins Disabled.” Rebooting Safari, you will now see “missing plug-in” where Flash used to play. For workarounds for still being able to play Flash video in Safari, there’s the excellent Safari Extension YouTube5.

However, if your Mac supports Flash 10.2′s hardware acceleration, perhaps it’s time to consider letting Adobe back on your Mac.

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The Business of Play

First, note that even RIM is reluctant to frame the device as a direct iPad competitor. The press release for the PlayBook emphasizes its business appeal, citing “advanced security features, out-of-the-box enterprise support” and a brand new development platform aimed at IT departments. BlackBerry knows where its real strength lies, and it seems to know to avoid Apple’s, too.

RIM didn’t create the PlayBook to storm the consumer market. It did it because it had to, or face losing enterprise customers to iOS. Since a tablet is definitely useful in a business setting, people are already buying iPads for enterprise purposes, basically because they don’t have a choice. It’s probably true that most would prefer a BlackBerry option, so that’s what RIM’s providing. That also accounts for the timing of the announcement. RIM showed its hand early, but it’ll stop some businesses from making an IT buying decision until it can bring a device to market.

Early to Rise, Early to Bed

RIM may be retaining some customers on the enterprise side by announcing early, but it definitely isn’t doing itself any favors in the consumer market. First, Apple and other competitors know exactly what’s coming in six or so months, making it very easy to plan product updates that surpass the PlayBook’s hardware specs. Second, savvy consumers can tell that the PlayBook’s specs are on par with the iPad now, and perhaps beat it in some areas, but they also know Apple updates its devices at least yearly.

That means consumers are expecting an iPad with Retina Display and probably at least a front-facing camera with FaceTime at around the time the PlayBook arrives. The iPad revision’s upgrades will probably make the BlackBerry look decidedly last-gen.

The App Lead

Even if the BlackBerry PlayBook launches with a terrific development framework, and App World gets a significant update that makes it much more appealing to users, Apple’s lead in the app game is basically insurmountable at this point. That’s bad news for RIM’s hopes in both the consumer and the enterprise arena.

Forced to Follow

So is the PlayBook revolutionary? No, it’s a bitter pill RIM CEO Lazardis and Co. were forced to swallow, and it’s being rushed to market to defend a market segment that’s traditionally belonged to the BlackBerry maker. But RIM will continue to succeed in business, for the same reasons that it always has.

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Since I know some of you are going to mention Firefox, I’ll tell you right now that I’ve ruled it out. It just doesn’t feel right to me. I’ll use Firefox on Windows, but on a Mac it’s just… weird. Feel free to disagree in the comments.

Interface

I suppose Chrome has an attractive interface, but I do think it looks better on Windows, partly because it feels designed for it rather than OS X (look at Chrome’s bookmarks manager and you’ll see what I mean). It just looks better with Aero.

Some aspects of Chrome’s tabs implementation annoy me. Mostly, I’m pretty happy with them, but there are two drawbacks. One being that, because the tabs take up the title bar, there’s less room to drag the window. This isn’t a problem for people who maximize their browser windows, but I like to keep my windows a certain size and I move them around a lot, since I’m always dragging images onto my desktop.

Another side effect of having the tabs in the title bar means that Chrome’s title bar doesn’t really function like one; you never actually see the full title of a web page unless it fits within the tab, which seems like a small complaint, but it’s still annoying.

Features

There were several features I missed from Safari when I switched to Chrome. Probably the one I missed most was Safari’s Reader view, which lets you reformat a long passage of text in an attractive drop-down that cuts out the clutter.

Fortunately, there’s an extension for Chrome that mimics Reader, and actually surpasses it in some ways. The extension’s called iReader and is available in the Chrome extensions gallery. When you hit the arrow keys to scroll through something in Reader for Safari, the cursor doesn’t disappear like it does in normal web pages, but it does in the iReader extension, which is less distracting for me.

Speaking of extensions, there aren’t any extensions I’ve come across for Chrome that aren’t available for Safari, or that I absolutely can’t live without. The opposite isn’t true. In fact, one of the unofficial Safari extensions that I love, ClickToFlash, isn’t available for Chrome, and it looks like that’ll be the case for some time.

Performance

It’s almost a crapshoot here. I can tell you that using Chrome feels faster than using Safari, but only a little. They both use the same rendering engine, WebKit, but they use different JavaScript engines, and from what I’ve learned about both Safari’s Nitro and Chrome’s V8, V8 is superior, but the difference in speed is also small.

On the interface performance side, I’ve noticed that when I have about six tabs open in Chrome, dragging the tabs around gets laggy. I don’t experience this lag with Safari, which I think has the best implementation of tab-dragging in any browser.

Bugs

I can generally say that I’ve experienced more bugs in Chrome than I have in Safari. For instance, in Chrome, almost every time I go back to a Google search result from, say, a Wikipedia page, the page doesn’t display and I’m left with the cute little dead tab face, then I have to re-enter the search in Google. It’s almost a deal-breaker for me.

There are other bugs, of course, but none that are as annoying or pervasive as the above.

Security

Chrome wins here, bar none. Safari is notorious for being a vector of vulnerability attacks, having famously been hacked in just 10 seconds at the annual Pwn2Own contest in 2009, while Chrome was the only browser that wasn’t hacked. However, security isn’t enough to make me switch to Chrome, as there’s very little chance I’d get a virus anyway, since there aren’t many viruses developed for the Mac and I’m a pretty safe surfer.

Will I stay with Chrome?

After using Chrome for a couple of weeks and getting accustomed to all its quirks on the Mac, I’ve decided to switch back to Safari. There just isn’t enough reason for me to stick with Chrome, and the Google search bug mentioned above is a huge annoyance, one that outweighs the poor performance of Safari on the one page that had me considering a switch to begin with.

Did I make the right choice? How’s your experience with Chrome been?

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I’ll be testing Safari 5.1, Safari 4 beta (thanks to its tabs-on-top design), Chrome 5, Firefox 3.6, Firefox 4 beta 3, Opera 10.6, Camino 2, Shiira 2.2, Sunrise 2.1, and iCab 4.8 .

Testing so many browsers presents a problem: Not all browsers use the same UI conventions. For example, Opera doesn’t have a bookmarks bar; its bookmarks are contained in a sidebar. To remedy this, I’ve broken the tests into two sections, showing different parts of the browser chrome. Section one will be with the bookmarks bar hidden, so only the tab bar and toolbar are showing, so I’m able to include Opera. Section two will be with the bookmarks bar shown, so Opera will be excluded from it. I’ll also include a third section that shows the data overall. I omitted testing status bars because Chrome doesn’t really have one, and I’d argue that most people don’t use them.

Tab Bar and Toolbar

I’ll go ahead and say that there are two winners here: Chrome 5 and the Safari 4 beta. But why is Chrome also a winner when the Safari 4 beta so clearly trumps it? My reasoning is that Chrome is a current browser, and that I had to go through a strange rigmarole process to even get the Safari 4 beta running, and it still crashed every time I opened a new tab, so it’s not really usable.

The loser here, by a large margin, is iCab. This was using the default configuration, so I messed with it a little, used small icons and hid the text beneath them. It still came in last, right behind Shiira with 91 pixels, only beating itself. iCab developers, if you’re reading this, please make iCab less space-hungry.

What’s interesting about the comparison between Firefox is that tabs-on-top actually uses slightly more pixels than tabs-on-bottom. Also, using small icons will save you eight pixels.

Here’s a screenshot comparing the top six browsers in this section:

With Bookmarks Bar

Unsurprisingly, the winner here is the Safari 4 beta. However, I was surprised to find that the second winner was Safari 5. Yes, Safari 5 narrowly beats out Chrome by just one pixel. iCab is last in place, by a large margin, again.

I also figured out that, on average, you can save about 20 pixels without the bookmarks bar.

Here’s another screenshot showing the top five browsers in this section:

Overall

I’ve made two graphs that show the data overall: the first by number of pixels in ascending order, the second by browser. I’ve also included a couple of bonuses: I measured Internet Explorer 5 for Mac and Netscape 9. IE doesn’t have a tab bar, so I just measured it with the bookmarks bar. It makes a good watermark for big browsers. And yes, iCab still comes in last, even behind IE. Netscape was surprisingly small, with the minimum being 83 pixels, just behind Sunrise.

Is pixel-friendliness important in a browser? Does it affect which browser you use? Sound off in the comments.

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Now there’s a solution for the Mac: Rapportive. It takes over the advertisements area in Gmail, and provides basic information about your email correspondents: occupation, Twitter/Flickr/LinkedIn links, age, location and custom notes. Yes, it supports Google Apps accounts, and the preview version of Mailplane now has an option to view Rapportive data. The experience definitely feels like a beta, with occasional inaccurate or missing information, but it’s great having so much additional context inside my email.

The problem? Rapportive so far only works in Google Chrome and Firefox as an extension. Safari is missing out since it doesn’t support simple extension development. Now that Chrome has overtaken Safari in market share, Apple needs to step up its game in terms of features. Both Safari and Mail.app need extension support to integrate all of these new social products. I am aware that some important extensions like Evernote and 1Password exist for Safari, but there is no official Apple documentation or support on how to build extensions. This needs to change. Unfortunately for Apple, Google and Mozilla already have thousands of extensions available.

Historically I have always been a loyal Safari user. Sure, I’ve flirted with Firefox occasionally, but I always came back to Safari eventually. I’m afraid, however, that I’ve finally found a browser that has led me to leave Safari for good: Google Chrome.

I started using Chromium, the open-sourced branch of the browser, a few months ago and switched to the developer branch of Chrome when it got support for extensions. Even though the Beta version of Chrome for the Mac now has extensions support I’m sticking with the developer branch just because I like getting new goodies before other people.

Whatever version of Chrome you’re using on the Mac, you now have access to most of the features that people will want from a browser, so if you’re ready to take the plunge and make Chrome your default browser here, are a few hints and tips from you from someone who’s been using it for a while now.

Set up custom search engines

A feature that’s been available on other browsers for a long time but was always missing from Safari is the ability to set up custom search engines. This allows you to directly search websites, Google Images, Yahoo etc., by using keywords in your search. In Google Chrome you can set this up by right clicking on the address bar and select Edit Search Engines… from the list. If you’ve been using Chrome for a while you’ll notice that several websites have already been populated, this is because Chrome automatically adds any search engines you use to the list.

To make any search engine easily accessible double-click on it and change its keyword to something easy to remember, such as fb for Facebook. From now on you can use that specific search engine by entering the keyword first in the address bar and then entering your search query.

Sync your bookmarks with Safari and the iPhone

If you’re an iPhone user, one of the problems with switching away from Safari is that your new browser doesn’t synchronize bookmarks with your phone. Thankfully the Xmarks extension offers a handy workaround since it will synchronize both your Chrome and Safari bookmarks with the cloud. Thus when you make a change to your bookmarks in Chrome it will automatically synchronize with Safari and by extension the iPhone.

Get 1Password into Chrome

1Password is my go to password manager and not having it in Chrome was a pain. Thankfully the helpful folks over at Agile are working on an alpha as we speak, and even though it’s not perfect yet, it’s good enough for me to use it on a daily basis. To use the extension you’ll need to download the latest beta build of 1Password, which you can do from your update settings in the program. You can get the 1Password alpha extension here. If you’d prefer to avoid alpha software, which is certainly something to consider, there’s also this workaround available until we get a final shipping version.

Keep track of your tabs

If you’re anything like my wife, your browser windows quickly become crowded with tabs. Finding the exact page you’re looking for is difficult when those tabs shrink down to the size of a thimble. Thankfully there are a variety of tab management extensions available for Chrome. I’ve gone through almost all of them, and have found some unstable and some just plain ugly, but I can heartily endorse VerticaTabs, which is both simple and stable.

Get rid of unresponsive tabs

One of Google Chrome’s most interesting features is that each tab is an independent process. With Safari when a tab became completely unresponsive I was often forced to relaunch the entire browser. With Chrome, however, you can use the built-in Task Manager to get rid of a tab, even if clicking on it does nothing.

Simply go to View > Developer > Task Manager to see a list of all processes, including your extensions. Pick the offending tab from the list and press the End Process button. Please note that you may need to be on the developer branch of Google Chrome to use this feature, as I’m not sure it’s been added to the Beta version.

Get on the developer channel of Chrome

Speaking of the developer channel, if you’re willing to put up with some risk and want Google Chrome goodies before the more stable Beta channel gets them, then you can switch to the developer channel. The developer channel is a bit more stable than the Chromium nightly builds, which include all the latest updates to the open-source version of Chrome, but I can’t promise it won’t crash on you.

Macworld’s Joe Kissell observes that there are many fine Mac Web browsers to choose from, and there’s no reason not to have several installed so that you can switch among them as needed. Indeed, I virtually always have at least three up and running at any given time.

Safari vs. Firefox

However, most folks are inclined to rely primarily on one main browser, and for that purpose, Kissell recommends using one of the two most popular ones — either Apple’s Safari or Mozilla’s Firefox  – which he says both make excellent all-around choices and work well as a default browser, which I don’t dispute, although neither are my own choice as my number one browser. Kissell notes that certain situations may make one or the other of these two browsers an especially good choice, outlining several areas where in his estimation they respectively excel. Of course such evaluations tend to be somewhat subjective.

For example, Joe likes Safari’s built-in PDF support. I’m personally not a big fan. While the built-in facility means you don’t have to switch to Preview or Adobe Reader to launch a PDF file you still have to wait while it loads in the browser window, and saving it is another step. I prefer the download and view mode, but that’s just me. Joe mentions that if you like inline PDF viewing, a free extension called Firefox-Mac-PDF will add similar functionality to Firefox.

Another Safari feature Joe likes is the ability to resize text area controls (multi-line text fields) by dragging the handle in the lower right corner of the field. This is indeed handy, but not a killer feature, in my opinion.

How Often Will You Want to Do That?

I do agree that Safari’s full-text history searches (Safari’s Top Sites view>History -> Show Top Sites) and search field for words that appeared on Web pages you viewed recently even if they’re no longer open is pretty cool, and he likes Safari’s ability to display graphics in non-Web TIFF or JPEG 2000 formats, although how often will you want to do that?

When Firefox May Be a Better Choice

However, Joe thinks there are also instances where Firefox is a better choice than Safari, such as when using Google Toolbar — another free extension for Firefox that adds a long and user-configurable list of features to the browser, including quick access to various Google Gadgets.

He also likes Firefox’s more flexible and versatile privacy setting configuration that lets you configure many privacy settings per domain, as opposed to Safari’s all-or-nothing privacy setting limitations, and praises the vast range of choice in Firefox add-ons and plug-ins compared with the lack of an officially supported plug-in API for Safari. For folks who like to tweak their browser functionality, Firefox is the way to go.

Firefox (and its sibling Gecko-based browsers like Camino and SeaMonkey) can also display inline mathematical equations, while Safari and other WebKit-based browsers only support display of linear strings of characters.

Why I Use Opera and Chrome More Than Safari and Firefox

Personally, I use Firefox more than Safari, but Opera 10 and lately Google’s Chrome for Mac each respectively get more hours of surfing on my machines than Firefox and Safari combined, and both Opera and Chrome have features I miss when using the more mainstream browsers, such as their superior download managers, Opera’s up-front and versatile Zoom menu, and Chrome’s raw speed, fast startup, and “right now” Finder response. Opera and Chrome both seem more nimble and less inclined to be memory hogs than Safari and Firefox (although the latter has cleaned up its act in that regard somewhat in recent iterations). I prefer the looks of Opera and Chrome as well, but as Joe Kissell noted, we have an embarrassment of choice in browsers these days, and everyone should be able to find a browser (or two or three) that suits their needs and tastes to a tee.

What’s your favorite OS X browser, and why?

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The only thing really keeping me from moving over to Chrome full-time at this point is my reliance on Safari for ClickToFlash. Luckily, the newest Dev build of Chrome released yesterday enables support for extensions so closing this gap should now be easier than ever.

If you’re not familiar with ClickToFlash, it’s a Webkit plug-in that replaces all flash elements on a web page with a nice nondescript gray gradient and a little Flash logo.

To view the blocked Flash you just click the logo and the browser loads it in. This has a number of benefits, not the least of which are that since the flash won’t be loaded until you ask for it page load times won’t grind to a crawl, your CPU usage won’t spike, and you won’t be forced to look annoying home mortgage ads when all you do is rent.

The easiest way to replicate this bit of functionality in Chrome (now that the latest Dev build supports it) is to just grab an extension. A quick search through the extensions gallery surfaces a number of possible options to choose from.

• FlashBlock (by Josorek) offers the most configurability with options for managing a whitelist of sites, blocking not only Flash but Silverlight as well, and customizing the look and placement of the placeholder icon.
• Kill-Flash is based on a Jetpack port of ClickToFlash and so it looks a lot like what I’m used to seeing in Safari. Unfortunately though, it doesn’t seem to work as well as it’s pedigree might suggest. By default the extension has whitelisted some sites such as YouTube and Gmail but left out any options for the user to manage the list.
• Another FlashBlock (this time by Ruzanow) works well enough but provides less configuration options than its identically named competitor. This flavor of FlashBlock blocks both Flash and Silverlight and provides no options pane for managing your whitelist. You can disable it for a site by right-clicking on the placeholder of a Flash element but there seems to be no way of then removing that site from the list.

I’ve been using FlashBlock by Josorek for a few weeks now, first with the latest Dev builds of Chromium and now with the most recent Dev build of Chrome, and would recommend it as the best one of the options above.

Of course you could also go with a more robust approach to block not only Flash but all advertisements using something like AdBlock but for me that’s a bit overkill. Now that Chrome has enabled support for extensions I’d be curious in hearing how others are customizing their installs of Chrome. If you have a favorite extension or user script you’ve been using please share it with us in the comments.

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