You read it right - we never thought it would happen but it did. Safari now supports Windows (XP & Vista). It is released under public beta 3 so expect a some bugs here and there. With this latest move, Apple has up the browser wars a notch.

Our experience with it has been quite good overall. Take note that we’ve never used Safari before so there might be a few things that we’ve missed.

Interface

User interfaces are Apple’s forte and naturally, it’s one of the best we’ve ever seen for a default skin. The interface is fine tuned to maximized to viewable area for web pages without scrolling. We love how the page load status is integrated with the address bar.

However it seems that tooltips have been left out - which makes using Safari a bit confusing for newbies like us. We wished we would’ve known the functions behind certain buttons like the plus (add bookmark) and the spider (report bugs).

Converting to Safari takes some getting used to.

Speed

Very fast. Safari seems to skip Javascript and proceed to loading of the entire page. Which means, you get to view the whole webpage immediately without waiting for stuff like Adsense.

It claims

The fastest web browser on any platform, Safari loads pages up to 2 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2.

And it executes JavaScript up to 2.8 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2.

Well, it’s definately faster than Internet Explorer …

Rendering

Without a doubt, Safari offers the best text rendering there is. There are even 3 types of font smoothing to choose from. Pressing tab to access different elements will make the current element glow in blue.

Additional Features

Safari also has some additional features like

• Snapback
• Built-in RSS Reader
• Resizable text boxes
• Inline find

The RSS reader can stand its ground as a fully featured RSS reader; for the average user, the features are more than sufficient.

Summary

Safari presents itself as an excellent contender among Windows-based browsers. Each basic function expected from a browser is done almost to perfection in Safari. Though certain minor differences may hinder the conversion process, IE users will certainly be pleased with it. To Firefox users however, the lack of add-ons and other extensibilities is a big turn off.

While the end users in us delight, the web designers in us cringe at the possibility of yet another Browser-OS combo to deal with. We are hoping this doesn’t trigger the comeback of IE for Mac. So far, no news yet regarding discrepencies between the Windows and Mac version. Might as well give it a run and see how your web pages render against Safari.

Download Safari

Tags: Apple, Beta, Browser, Desktop, Download, Reviews, Safari, Software

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