Safari 3 on Windows
I was among the first wave of people who downloaded the Safari 3 Beta for Windows yesterday. My first impressions were deluded a bit by my poor-performing machine, but generally I’m pretty impressed. The rendering is pretty fast and its memory footprint is pretty small compared to the other browsers running on my machine. I left Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Safari running on my machine overnight, here’s the memory usage:
- Firefox – 245 MB
- Opera – 67 MB
- Internet Explorer – 58 MB
- Safari – 21 MB
It’s worth noting that Safari also takes up less memory than Outlook, the Yahoo! Widget Engine, and Microsoft Word.
Since Safari 3 is built on the latest WebKit builds (522), it has tons of bug fixes and great DOM support. I’m excited to see all the things I’ll be able to do once I get under the hood.
The parts I don’t like: it doesn’t feel Windows-native. Firefox took a lot of heat for not making their Mac version feel like a Mac app, and Safari is doing the same thing on Windows. I hate that I have to go to the lower-right corner to resize the window and the font smoothing drives me nuts. I find it very hard to read and it tends to make things blurry.
Overall, though, I think it’s a step in the right direction. I always felt this day was inevitable, and I’m glad it’s finally here.
Disclaimer: Any viewpoints and opinions expressed in this article are those of Nicholas C. Zakas and do not, in any way, reflect those of my employer, my colleagues, Wrox Publishing, O'Reilly Publishing, or anyone else. I speak only for myself, not for them.
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4 Comments
I agree. It doesn’t feel like a Windows app, and that font smoothing is crap. I was disappointed when I fired it up and saw that it used the same look and feel as on the Mac and used the same font smoothing engine (ClearType is there for a reason…).
Oh… no error console either, at least that I can find.
Jeremy on June 12th, 2007 at 3:05 pm
I too checked it out today and I was immediately put off by the "Mac" GUI. Funny thing is I run a skin with WindowBlinds to emulate OSX and Safari still didn’t look right. Does Apple even have any Windows-looking apps?
It did crash on me once but I’ve read that you need a reboot after installing to get to run smoothly.
It IS a beta, so as you put it, it’s a step in the right direction, but I don’t think that Apple is going to budge much on the GUI, which means I could never use it for everyday use.
Andrew Herron on June 12th, 2007 at 9:27 pm
I had a play with Windows Safari yesterday, mainly to see how our apps displayed. Good news (for us) was that they were absolutely spot on – it definitely pays to be standards compliant. I read a lot of comments yesterday about lots of sites – including a bunch of major league hitters – not rendering correctly, so I reckon I’m entitled to feel a little smug there
)
As for the browser itself, I’ve never used Safari before – years since I’ve even touched a Mac – and found the whole experience a bit disappointing. Non-Windows GUI I expected, but the awful font rendering was a surprise, as was the lack of support for title attribute tool-tips. Or any tool-tips for that matter – I had to click every button to see what it did. Which actually emphasises how much of these things we tend to take for granted.
I know it’s a beta, and there will be improvements, yadda yadda, but my overall impression was that it didn’t offer anything that Firefox or IE doesn’t, and certainly doesn’t have the same level of dev tools as Firefox, so other than as another test platform I don’t see me using Safari much at all.
Richy on June 13th, 2007 at 5:40 am
I think its a step in the right direction.
A couple of things I like
1) Having Safari available now for Windows. As a web developer its a huge blessing. Of course I still test all of my sites on a Mac… but its nice to be able to do most of my testing on the same machine.
2) The debug menu has a handy user-agent switcher that allows me to test my browser detection scripts on the fly.
A couple of things I would like to see.
1) Apple decided to disallow you from viewing https sites that don’t have a recognized certificate. This is an annoying "safety" feature (a warning dialog would have been sufficient) and it prevents me from testing https sites on my development server (using self signed SSL certs).
2) Better support for minimizing/maximizing in Windows.
Andy Webb on July 1st, 2007 at 10:56 pm
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