Safari for Windows
Apple recently released a version of their web browser Safari for Windows (XP and Vista) as a public beta, in an apparent attempt to nab some of the browser market away from Internet Explorer and Firefox (at a paltry 5% it certainly has a lot of work to do, although admittedly its share has, until now, been ceilinged by the Mac’s limited market share up).
I’ve been trying it out all day, so I thought I’d document my initial impressions:
- It looks identical to the Mac version; the only noticeable deviation from the theme is the Windows buttons in the top right of the window.
- The Apple site claims it renders 75% faster than IE but I haven’t noticed any speed advantage over IE7, Firefox 2.0 or Opera 9 (It should be noted that my impression is based on my use of a 3mbit broadband connection, users on slower connection speeds may indeed experience faster browsing).
- Automatically imports your other browsers (IE, FF and Opera) history and cookies. Also supports bonjour.
- Alt-Enter doesn’t open a new tab by default. Annoying. In fact none of the standard IE/FF keyboard shortcuts seem to work (this can be changed).
- Text looks funny, like cleartype on steroids. It looks nice at first but destroys your eyes after a while. You can turn it down in the preferences but it still looks funny to me.
- Uses OSX widgets in webpages (something Firefox doesn’t do on the Mac apparently, this will change in 3.0), which is interesting but irritating if you like a consistent UI.
- Has a nifty bookmark manager, although features nothing you can’t do with a few Firefox extensions.
- Performance is less than satisfactory, but it doesn’t suffer from memory-leaks a la Firefox.
Anyway, it’s not a bad browser, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen or done before. I can’t see it catching on with regular Windows users, unless they buy into the iPhone thing. Anyway, a least it’ll make testing sites on multiple browsers that much easier.
