While recently doing testing for a new web project, it occurred to me that Safari and Chrome both use the Webkit engine, yet are produced by two different companies (Apple and Google).
Since it is the engine that does the bulk of the rendering work, can one of these browsers be safely disregarded during testing? Or are are there subtle differences that make testing in both worthwhile?
There are certainly differences. Looking at just the rendering front, Safari and Chrome will inevitably use different versions of Webkit (it's development is pretty fast-moving). Any differences are likely to be minor, though.
Besides rendering, there is also Javascript to think about and minor things like font differences and platform differences (Safari is inevitably more popular on Macs).
You can take the hassle out of checking rendering by using tools like BrowserShots, but it doesn't take much effort to quickly fire up Safari when you've finished development and click through a few pages to double-check everything is working OK.
YES, there are differencies. Minor ones? It depends. Whem I 1st tested an iPad in the shop under my house I looked at some of my websites. I had a select box in a form that was not working on Safari on iPad.
Tested back in office on a PC: it did work on Chrome, but it did not work on Safari! And since in the specific case the select box was a mandatory field the user could not send the form.
Since that experince I always test every sites I make also on Safari, and YES just because iPad (and all Apple world) uses Safari.
