As has been reported in many places today, Apple’s Safari web browser is now available for Windows (as a Safari 3 Public Beta). And hey, there are even plugins — not to be confused with Firefox extensions though.
I first read about this earlier today at Scott Hanselman’s blog and it was his ravings about speed that convinced me to give it a shot.
It’s clearly fast. Very fast. Like, noticeably fast, loading a half dozen sites (that take IE7 or FF2 a few seconds) within a blink of an eye. If nothing else, they’ve set the performance bar higher.
I’ve always said I’ve never understood why I needed a Core2Duo with 4Gigs of RAM to parse 50k of angle brackets.
Love that last sentence.
Well Mr. Hanselman, if you don’t have a Core2Duo it isn’t all that fast. It must be optimized well for multiple CPUs (or cores) which is indeed a huge plus for folks with modern PCs. On my old dinosaur (AMD 2600+) it is a tad bit faster than Firefox but I think Opera 9 kicks its smooth, silvery butt all over the playground.
Scott also mentioned the font smoothing… as does Atwood’s Coding Horror blog. Neither of them are exaggerating! After using it for 30 minutes my eyes are watering. I’ve been experimenting with the 3 options and haven’t really found one that I love.
Following the comments at at Coding Horror, it seems I need to either scoot my chair back, increase the font size or up the DPI a bunch.
Hey Apple? If I “center-click” on a tab, make the tab close like all the other major browsers ok? And not to start a holy war, but making the lower-right corner the only way to resize a window feels so… 90s…
As far as memory usage goes, it definitely is a modern browser. I had no problem pushing 400MB within a few minutes. On the plus side, however, it does release a lot of that when minimized.
Will this replace any of my other browsers? Nope, doesn’t seem very likely. Not yet. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some great stuff here. But I just can’t get past the fact that my eyes are watering.
All that aside though, I am excited to have it. Why? This’ll make testing web sites for Safari users a lot cheaper (I still can’t afford a mac) and easier (no more trying to remember the name of that website that’ll give me a Safari screen-shot). That alone makes it worth keeping around.
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June 11th, 2007 
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I downloaded it. Indeed it loaded pages fast, but the overall performance was not too good (on my 2.93 GHz Pentium 4 with 1 GB RAM).
It looks pretty nice, but I don’t think I am going to use it (I might download it just to test it out) because for me firefox has everything I need.
@Michael – yep, that about sums up my experience from yesterday. Oddly enough, today it seems faster (and I’m not revisiting any cached sites). I wonder if the reboot this morning helped.
@Blogging Blog (what an odd name!) – you might as well grab and try it. If nothing else, it helps to know how your site or blog looks in more than one browser.
I also wrote a short review on my website here:
http://www.peteranglea.com/2007/06/12/safari-for-windows-a-brief-review/
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