Steve Jobs looked very happy when he announced the unveiling of the public beta of Safari 3.0 for Windows XP and Vista – and I can understand why. Today I have played around with the Safari 3.0 for Windows, and here are my first impressions.

Installation
The installation file is quite small, it weighs in at only 7.97MB and Apple’s bandwidth is always top notch giving you a quick download. The installation took about 1 minute on my old Pentium 4 2.4Ghz and everything went smooth. But, it didn’t import any feeds or bookmarks…

Browsing around
The browser starts with Apple’s own startpage opened up and the page renders very quickly. You can in fact feel that it renders certain pages a lot faster than Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2.

When you start browsing around on other sites that haven’t been tested or written for Safari, you immediately run into trouble. I browsed to a couple of sites I visit very frequently, namely Google Mail and Feedburner – and both of them had some serious issues.

Here’s an example of how the folder menu is rendered using Safari 3.0 for Windows (Internet Explorer 6 to the right).

…and here’s the other example site I tried, Feedburner. The layout was so messed up that I couldn’t use the service at all.

Apple feeling

Yesterday, you could easily have fooled anyone that you were running an Apple OS on your computer. The feeling is quite very much like running Safari on a OS X – just look at the nice buttons you’ll get at Google.com (the shot was taken on a machine running Windows XP).

Intial thoughts

The page rendering is very fast – and very buggy. I sincerely hope that Apple will improve the rendering engine to be more compatible with IE and Firefox code, because I really like the application, if it wasn’t for all the rendering bugs.

I also hope they work a bit with the font rendering as some pages have very blurry fonts. Another thing is when I tried using the Windows button + M key to hide all open windows – all windows disappeared except two Safari Windows. Annoying!

It’s worth a download though – go get it. apple.com/safari.