Actually I wouldn't say it's much safer than MEW! MEW can be used in several ways, I believe you can use Metamask to log into MEW as well for example. But you can also use a hardware wallet with MEW, etc. So it really depends on the method to determine how safe it is.
And while Metamask is pretty cool.... it doesn't support hardware wallets as far as I know. That means the private keys are stored somewhere on your pc which means that in theory a hacker or virus can get to it.