Safari on Windows anyone?
by Volker Weber
ars technica is very impressed:
We put the Windows beta of Safari 3 through the wringer last summer, we weren't impressed. With 3.1 out of beta, we wanted to know, have things improved? Wow, have they.
I have not tried. Have you?
Comments
I have, yes, and it's a memory monster, imo.
Flock rocks.
I have it on my Office PC and it looks much better than the bloody 3.0x betas. So far it seems fast and stable. No memory issues so far. Cheapo HP machine /w 3 GHz P4, Vista Ultimate, 2 GB RAM.
I used Safari 3.1 for some days now and agree to most of the ars review - it feels very fast on my low-endish xp box, font smoothing is always annoying but bearable when set to crt or light, and it is quite (or even very) stable. Especially 'heavy' pages like google docs and the likes feel more responsive than in Firefox.
What's missing for 'serious' browsing are search keywords - either Safari doesn't have them or i just haven't found them yet - and some kind of del.icio.us integration.
Yes, it´s really the first version of Safari on Windows that rocks.
Wow! What a difference. The prior version was painfully slow on my laptop. 3.1 is blazing fast.
I'm just in the middle of rebuilding my main PC to use Vista with SP1.
Part of the task was to install iTunes, which comes with Quicktime. During the installation of the applications I was asked if I would like to be prompted for any updates to my Apple software. I said yes, this installs the Apple updater software.
Following a subsequent reboot, I received a prompt that an update for my Apple software was available. So soon? The Apple updater dialog prompted me that a new version of Safari was available.
I don't use Safari. I've never used Safari. Safari is not installed. Why would I want to install an update to it?
So not only do Apple continually bomb me with software updates for software I DO use, now they've started with software updates for stuff I don't. This is rediculous.
Screenshot
I installed it at work to test out some JS heavy pages (which use the ExtJS javascript library) and it is impressive. There is a substantial speed improvement when pages contain a lot of javascript compared to FF2 and IE7, it is comparable with FF3 beta 4. In addition to this it has been stable.
The lack of plugins/addons though is a serious issue for me and so as soon as FF3 comes out of beta I will probably return to using that.
@Ben, yes that is how I came to try it out as well. It is pretty intrusive and par for the course for Apple, Quicktime reinstalling into startup everytime it updates anyone? It's a shame as it is a good browser.
Kieren / Ben, I agree it is very intrusive. This intrusion seems confined to Apple’s Windows software though, and I don’t understand why: it started with forcing Quicktime on users when they installed iTunes (which made more sense, given how much iTunes uses Quicktime), and seems to have snow-balled from there. Very odd.
I´ve followed the entry on Heise-Newsticker and have given it a try.
Wow, keen, small and (still) fast. Let´s wait until the crowd will be heard about all their plungin needs. Will Safari speed down the same as Firefox 2.0.0.12 at the moment? BTW - This mail is composed by using Opera 9.2 - spring is here so why not testing other browsers, too?
I have it installed for Website compatibility testing purposes - but I like it very much because of the speed. Now with Version 3.1 the most annoying bugs have been fixed, so I can use it even in my two monitor environment. To be honest all these bugs were ok, since it is a beta. While Firefox is my Browser of choice because of the wide variety of Web Development plugins - Safari is next in the list.
