Safari for Windows – first impressions
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.
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June 11th, 2007 22:34
Strange I’m also running the beta on Windows XP and not having any of the problems that you are on yahoo or google, mine looks good, nothing missing. I would like to see the font smoothing gone though, makes the text fuzzy. I turned it down to light but I really should be able to turn it off.
June 11th, 2007 22:52
It seems like the often-so-over-used beta mark is actually deserved in this case
June 11th, 2007 22:55
[...] The Windows version looks just like the Mac version and (according to Apple) it’s two times faster than Internet Explorer and 1.6 times faster than Firefox – but before you get your hopes up you should bear in mind that this release is rightfully marked beta, there’s plenty of reports of websites rendering poorly in it still. [...]
June 11th, 2007 23:05
a shame i can’t upload a screenshot to show you how miserably it failed on my old windows machine.. but of course it’s just a beta
waiting for a linux version, mr jobs
June 11th, 2007 23:29
andi: I think you don´t realize how funny it is when you are saying you are waiting for a linux version of Safari….
Why wait it is Konqueror…thats where safari comes from…
June 12th, 2007 02:45
i find it interesting that you like safari on the mac even.
i prefer camino for mac, runs faster and less memory intensive with multiple tabs open! (although i really need to learn more shortcuts!)
by the look of it safari for windows isn’t there yet, and if it chugs through memory like it does on a mac, i wouldn’t use it over firefox 2, but would consider it over firefox 1.
June 12th, 2007 03:13
Nice effort, but still needs work, for sure. The rendering needs major improvements, as some pages, such as GMail are ridiculous.
Safari may be a bit faster than Firefox but the annoyances aren’t worth it. Time to delete Safari and stick with Firefox.
Apple will improve it’s Browser, I’m sure!
June 12th, 2007 17:42
[...] Ikke nok med den ikke bringer noget nyt til markedet, den gør ikke sit job ordenligt, er ustabil og den er stinkende usikker med 6 kritiske fejl på bare en dag, deriblandt 2 remote sikkerhedshuller. [...]
June 12th, 2007 19:44
My Experience with Safari is one… bad.
Everything loads Slower than in firefox or IE (im on a 2048 Mbps Connection) And it eats my ram memory.
Also got some trouble with CSS things. some are out of the context…
June 13th, 2007 02:32
[...] Article here. Via Sighmon’s Twitter stream, here. [...]
June 13th, 2007 04:24
[...] Windows Safari really sucks at rendering type. Crunch Gear has just made the headline of the year with this article. LOLLERCOASTER! Also: Safari beta for Windows isn’t off to such a great start. [...]
June 13th, 2007 10:49
Amazing how they managed to mess up the rendering engine in this beta version. I simply can’t understand why Safari for Mac renders pages nicely where the PC version fails. This would have been perfect for web-developers that work with windows, just to test Safari compatibility. And now this…
My guess is, that they’re going to put the PC-Safari-Flaws into one of these PC vs. Mac ads.
PC: Hi mac, look, i got this new Browser called Safari installed
Mac: Wow how nice. Its standard on Mac you know.
PC: Let’s visit microsoft.com to see which one loads faster!
Mac: Sure, lets go.
* pages load *
Mac: Eww PC!. How screwed up is that. Look how nicely Safari for Mac renders these Pages.
PC: *crashes*
June 13th, 2007 10:57
An interesting Read on this topic:
http://www.heise-security.co.uk/news/91025
-
Heise comes to the following conclusion:
“The current version of Safari is at best an alpha release, i.e. an application which should be provided to a restricted group of testers at most.”
June 17th, 2007 23:04
I’m pretty sure Apple’s done this for ajax developers…http://thenewsroom.com/details/394435?c_id=wom-bc-js
May 13th, 2009 09:29
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