Monday, June 11, 2007
Thoughts on Safari 3 for Windows…
Something rather unexpected happened at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference this morning - a Windows version of the Safari browser was announced, and a beta build was made available for download.
I’ve spent the last couple of hours using it on my desktop running Vista and here are my initial thoughts and impressions. Comments are welcome.
The Good:
- Speed, speed, speed: As always, Apple has posted lots of numbers for you to chew on, and I was initially skeptical of the claims made. But after repeatedly testing Firefox 2, IE 7 and the Safari 3 beta on a pretty wide variety of sites (including those with 100+ images, heavy Javascript, etc.), I really do feel that Safari is perceivably the fastest of the three. This could be the one thing that could get me to switch browsers, if only it weren’t for the other limitations (read on). FYI, I’m on a dual-core Opteron system with 2GB of RAM.
- WebKit for Windows: This is perhaps the best part of having an official version of Safari for Windows. Web developers can now run their work through the WebKit rendering engine even if they don’t have access to a Mac. It certainly beats using the old browser screenshot services. :)
- Did I mention it’s fast? :P
The Bad:
- Am I still using Windows? If you thought iTunes and QuickTime looked out of place in Windows, wait till you see this thing; it’s like Apple ripped Safari out of OS X, added a menu bar to the top, and called it a Windows app. Textboxes, buttons, radio buttons, checkboxes…they all use the bubbly Aqua style. I guess this wouldn’t be so bad if it were 2004 and we were all skinning XP to look like OS X, but can we get something more native, please? Probably unlikely, but one can always hope.
- Who turned off ClearType? Somewhat related to the above point, Safari renders fonts differently from every other application on your system. This can be good or bad, depending on your preference, but it’s certainly disconcerting at first. I could probably get used to it with time, and the “Light” font smoothing option looks better than the default “Medium” setting to me. Try it.
- Look ma, no borders! This is one of those things that throws me off every time I use OS X, and now Windows users can get a piece of the aggravation too - you can only resize the window using the tiny gripper at the bottom right corner. Who in the world thought this was a good idea anyway?
- It’s no Firefox: As with my experiment with IE 7, I miss my extensions. Enough said.
The Ugly:
- Wonky mouse support: I could live with most of the limitations outlined in the previous section if I really, really had to, but this one’s a deal breaker, hence the new “ugly” section. The back and forward buttons on my mouse simply don’t work in Safari, and the scrolling speed with the mouse wheel is far too sluggish. This singlehandedly makes the whole browsing experience just dreadful. Apple, please get this fixed ASAP. And while you’re at it, how about letting us middle-click tabs to close them (as IE and Firefox do), rather than having us aim for the tiny “X” buttons?
So yeah, it’s not all bad, but it’s not all great either. Many of the shortcomings are forgivable, considering this is the first beta release of an application that they’ve never released for Windows, but they’re certainly enough to prevent me from using it as my primary browser. That said, it has found its place in my web development toolbox, giving me a way to finally test sites in WebKit quickly and easily, so not all is lost. :)
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14 Responses to “Thoughts on Safari 3 for Windows…”
- Pingback on Jun 12th, 2007 at 11:56 am
I hope this is a sign of things to come in the future, like more windows applications from Apple. If nothing else a little competition for the present applications is always good.
Good review! Agree with the extensions part. AdBlock, especially. It’s the major one. =P
The ClearType still works, right? I’m on Safari right now and the fonts seem to be fine.
I guess they can fix some issues because it’s still in Beta? =|
Okay, it just crashed on me twice. Happened everytime I tried to change my home page. =/
The speed, I am not so sure about.
It is definitely fast in some tasks but using it for a few hours on a variety of sites for VARIOUS tasks, it simply does not add up to the benchmarking results Apple so happily showed.
The fonts look terrible and it has started crashing very regularly.
The favorites management is non-existent to say the least simply because of its implementation. It allows no customization and is the primary cause of my crashes so far. Thank goodness for Vista stability else I would be a very annoyed user.
Certainly some nice things but when Apple promises things and fails to deliver in as massive a flop (yes, I said it) as this is, I am far from happy about things.
Heck, I still bash FF2 but it’s my primary browser now :)
Safari? Not so much.
Maybe if I was in Kenya.
Safari and iTunes are meant to be run on Mac OS X. Simple. Sure it is nice Apple is willing to release versions for Windows, they will never fit in. The entire rip from Mac OS X and stick on Windows was done on purpose, they want to emulate Safari on the Mac as closely as possible.
You could pass on your thoughts to the webkit team at irc://irc.freenode.org/#webkit
@Bilal:
>> The ClearType still works, right? I’m on Safari right now and the fonts seem to be fine.
It does use a subpixel rendering technique, but it’s not ClearType. You can see a comparison screenshot here:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000884.html
>> Okay, it just crashed on me twice. Happened everytime I tried to change my home page. =/
Yeah, it’s crashed on me a few times since yesterday. Too bad there’s no session saver for it, eh? ;)
It works pretty well (for a beta) for me, save for a couple things — I can’t enter Japanese text into form fields using the IME, which makes it useless if I want to do any browsing of Japanese sites. And on top of that, if your default non-Unicode language is set to Japanese then Japanese fonts won’t display properly (in pages or menus) since the font names are in Japanese and it apparently can’t read them then…
@Matthew: Those are some pretty important things to fix. You should make sure you report those to Apple.
Kunal: Yeah, I just saw your other post regarding that and it cleared things up…
Great review! I agree with everything you noted in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. This beta is a good effort but not ready for primetime, for me. The speed is nice but the font rendering is blecch. Surprisingly, it crashed on me from the very start.
Most importantly, those pesky security vulnerabilities are a big problem.
Here’s ArsTechnica’s take on the subject:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070612-afirst-look-safari-3-on-windows.html
yea i swear i have clicked the back button on my mouse 1 million times thinking taht i will go to the previous page… but nope i have to move the mouse to the back button in safari!!! fix it apple!!!