Safari on Windows
For those who have been living under a rock, a couple of weeks ago Apple have released their Safari browser for Windows. To satisfy my lust for new toys to try out I have been using Safari constantly for the past week. And here are the thing I like / don’t like about it:
The good:
- The UI: Although I must say that it seems a bit surreal to use an OS X application on Windows I do like how dialog boxes transition, the transitions when moving bookmarks around or even moving a link (a preview of the page is shown). Having said that it does still require some work, especially when minimizing / maximizing in which case performance is very lacking.
- RSS viewer: I believe the inbuilt RSS viewer is far more superior then that of IE 7. I especially like the ‘Article Length’ slider that allows you to view an ‘excerpt’ of long articles. The only negative comment I have about this feature is that the search is not as instantaneous as one would expect.
- Performance: This by far is the greatest feature of Safari and that will be prove to be IE’s / FF’s Achilles heel in the war with Safari. Any web-page that I have loaded in Safari loads much faster then in IE / FF. Have a look at Scott Hanselman’s browser speed shootout video for an indication of the performance.
- Bug reporting: Though this feature does not really effect the browsing experience it is very useful especially at the beta stage. What makes this feature worth mentioning is the fact that it allows you submit a screenshot and the source of the current page with a click of a button. I must say that this makes things easier for those who are always reluctant to file bug reports because of the complexity it involves.
- Font smoothing: Although many have been complaining about how Safari renders fonts and that they look ghastly - I believe that on my Dell Inspiron 9300 running Vista the reading experience is much better then in IE/FF.
The bad:
- Live.com: Safari does not yet support the components required by Live.com - which I use as my default RSS reader.
- NTLM support: NTLM is not yet supported in the current beta but it’s supposed to be in the final version.
- Tab switching: The tab switching shortcut is CTRL+SHIFT+{. That is way too complicated, I definitively prefer the IE/FF CTRL+TAB shortcut. Maybe this is customizable but I have not yet found from were to do this.
- Mouse support: As yet Safari has no support for the front/back buttons and wheel on a mouse. But I bet this will fixed at a later stage.
- Other issues: Minimizing / maximizing quality is flaky; some web-pages are broken (not really Safari’s fault); occasional crashes when opening dialog boxes.
Well that sums up my thoughts on Safari. Despite the issues I do believe that the Beta 3 is stable enough to use and I will definitely keep using it over the coming weeks - and will be looking forward to what Apple has in store for Safari in the future.
So my suggestion is head over to Apple’s website and give Safari a go.
