Daily Iteration

As you might know, Apple has released a beta version of its browser, Safari, for Windows.  Since I’m a huge fan of beta stuff and have been seriously considering whether my next notebook should be a Mac, I decided to test it for one full day - the idea being that during an entire day I would use only Safari, instead of Firefox.  I spend most of my time browsing, for fun and work, so this is a major test for me.  Here are my conclusions.

• It looks great

The user interface is sleek, nice and simple, and basically feels very nice to use.  That being said, there are a few inconveniences.  For instance, double-clicking on the tab bar does not create a new tab as you might expect - you have to right-click on it and select “Create a new tab”.  There is no option to have all links open on a new tab, forcing you to use either Ctrl+click or use the right mouse button and select from the menu - both of these are bad, they require you to do more than you should to just open a link where you want it.  While I hope these might be fixed in the final version, Safari does have some nice features, such as the option to “Merge all windows”, so that if some page does open a new window you can bring it back as a tab in your previous one (does Firefox do this?).  Ah, not to mention OS integration.  What is that anyway?  How I miss my Gnome+GTK days in this respect…

• Pages render beautifully

Yes, the pages look gorgeous in Safari!   Probably related to Apple’s font rendering mechanism discussed over at Joel on Software yesterday. Apparently people’s opinion on this varies, but to my eyes this alone is Safari’s biggest plus - my blogs all looked awesome So now I envy all you Mac people for living in a much prettier internet than I do…

• It’s stable (for me, anyway)

I used it for an entire day with not a single crash.  This is not what some people reported, but in my experience it was pretty stable.  It ran and started up pretty fast right from the start on my Core Solo notebook with 1GB RAM, also against what other folks experienced.

• It’s not usable everywhere

Some sites complained.  Others displayed drop-down menus in odd ways.  Overall it was not bad, but there were some glitches.  However, Apple has included a handy “report a bug” button that sends the source code and a screenshot of the site you’re visiting to Apple - Mozilla folks should look at this, very nice touch.

Overall, Safari impressed me, and I had a much easier day than I thought I would have.  Things just look great in Safari, and if you are, like me, a sucker for pretty things on your screen (I stare at it all day long, might as well make it look good), you might enjoy Safari.  That being said, it’s still not usable as your only browser, as some sites don’t collaborate with it too well.  Feels like the early days of using Firefox .  For the power-users out there, going without all your Firefox extensions will be a problem - it certainly was for me.  It is a nice browser though, and Apple should see the number of users increase.  If they iron out a few details and perhaps make it extensible like Firefox is (not even OpenSearch plugins, Apple?), who knows, it might work…