I have been trying the latest release of the Safari Browser for Windows, and I must say, I am quite impressed. As you may have known, previous versions of this beta have been pretty buggy, and was not at all as fast as Apple promised it would be.

But the latest version changes all that. Time taken to render pages has increased dramatically and is on par [or even faster] than Firefox.
It starts up in a snap, loads pages quickly, renders flash properly and looks very tidy. The only grip I had with it is its high memory usage. When I opened around 3 tabs, it consumed around a 130 MB of memory. I hope Apple works on that.

Other than that, the browser is beautiful but it still has a long way to go to compete with giants like Opera and Firefox.

Please post your comments and what YOU fell about the browser, What I have stated was just MY opinion.

LINK

the font smoothing looks all wrong on windows, why can't they just use cleartype like everyone else.

it would also be nice if it had vista shadows on the window

Yeah I noticed that too. And the close buttons on the tab should have ben on the right, as it is more convenient for me after using Firefox.

Plus, the double click shortcut to open a tab does not work in Safari. And I could do with some extensions!

I tried it earlier and the font smoothing still gets on my nerves. The memory usage is crazy. Like what was said above I only had a few tabs open and my system started to crawl pretty bad.

Other than that it would be a decent browser on Windows if they'd just fix those two things along with small tweaks in appearance.

Agreed! But since I have a GB of memory, it does not affect me that badly.

They added windows style font rendering in a nightly a while ago, 3.0.5 will probably have that code in it.

One down one more to go!

i heard 3.1 is coming out soon

Am I the only one who loved the way the fonts looked on the Windows Safari??

I love how it looks. Wikipedia looks better and a lot of other news sites. As for Safari, sometimes when I try to load a page it gives me an error until I refresh a few times but other than that I like it.

I enabled windows style rendering, and went straight back to the normal style, it's much better.

And it's still using sub-pixel anti-aliasing.

On Windows?

I agree, Wikipedia looks much better with the current Windows font.

Unto Darkness, I don't understand what you are trying to say? Lol. This is a thread about the Windows version of Safari and I said I love the way the fonts look on Windows...

Is it just that you are suprised that I like the font on Windows? lol

I left firefox on all night, it used up over 2Gb :-/

I tried Safari 3.0.4 and went back to Firefox in 20 minutes. Couldn't stand it.

That's a new record.

It's pretty slick, but I don't really see any advantages compared to Firefox. For now I'll just appreciate being able to test my sites in Safari without needing a Mac.

Lol their performance charts are funny....since when did opera go from the fastest to the slowest?

Thanks for explaining what you couldn't stand about it...

Hmm I just tried it out again and the performance is impressive. After seeeing other Windows software from Apple (iTunes...), it's not what I expected.

It's actually taking advantage of multithreading (unlike FF, IE, or Opera), though the rendering is still a bit choppy (like Opera) for Javascript animation.

I just wish it were a bit more like a normal Windows app...

Safari needs to look native in Windows, or else it will never take off.

Skip 3.04 and try out the latest webkit. Fastest browser ever.

http://nightly.webkit.org/

Yeah, it'd be nice if Safari was a bit more Windows Native, and ported to Ubuntu or another major Linux Distribution. (Or at least a webkit using something or other).

The only gripe I really have about it is the bookmarking system. It is simply not easy to select one bookmark and open it in a new tab. You either have to open every one in the same folder, or overwrite the tab your using or Crtl+T and select a bookmarked website.

There are already GTK and QT ports of WebKit (and WebKit and KHTML are "unforking")

And there's now 2 windows ports, one is Apple's (and uses their own graphics framework) and the other comes out of the GTK guys port and uses Cairo for graphics (like Gecko 1.9)

Safari is annoying and lacks some important features for me (single window mode like firefox has), but the engine is great.

Edit: I'd love for the Windows version to get native widgets though, the Mac version uses Mac widgets, GTK uses GTK widgets, QT uses QT widgets, Windows uses Mac widgets

Thanks for the information, and yes, I agree a single window mode would be nice. Remembering Ctrl+Click to open in a new tab is not difficult, but it'd be nice not to have to remember that. As to the other windows port, are you talking about Swift?

For single window mode, i use Saft. SafariStand does it as well too.

Would be nice if they included it by default though.

I just use middle click on my mouse, and I end up doing the same in Firefox (since some windows i want to open in the background instead of replacing the current tab), but I'd like to be able to avoid multiple windows unless I specifically open it.

And I'm talking about this port (or "sub-port") http://www.atoker.com/blog/2008/02/10/webk...-cairo-support/

Well, my laptop doesn't have other than an emulated middle click, and I dug up that cairo with windows subport. Now if they can just get it out the door for us. I also learned about the epiphany webkit project and the various other webkit on Linux and devices that are out there. I love search engines.

I agree that it needs to look more native to Windows, just like iTunes needs to. However, I don't agree that it needs to look more like that in order to take off because iTunes took off and that doesn't look native to Windows...

If they aren't going to make iTunes or Safari native to Windows then they should at least make them consistent with each other on the Windows platform and put the same Close, Maximize and Minimize buttons on Safari which they have in iTunes.

It was really slow (when it worked).

I think that says enough. And I have cable internet.

Yes, it is, at least on the Mac platform. Not sure if they are planning a simultaneous release on the Windows platform.


Not at all, I think Safari has great font rendering. It looks good on Windows, although its actual methods of rendering were borrowed from OS X's Quartz technology. It looks as good as ClearType does on Vista, I think.


I agree, Safari doesn't belong on Windows, it's just not "there." It really sticks out, just like Firefox 2 does on OS X.


Agreed. Between Safari and iTunes, Apple seems far too concerned with the aesthetics of the software itself, and not how it integrates into the rest of the platform. One of the reasons people are drawn to OS X is not because it looks beautiful, but because everything works together. Safari for Windows (as well as iTunes), does not. And I doubt this will change because it would go against Apple's (smug?) image.

Coding Horror put it better, Non-Native UI sucks.

May be Safari on Windows Aren't that great. But i dont think anyone could deny Webkit is a good Engine.

Once GTK Port and Cario Works out then we may see an Native Look on Windows.

I really hope webkit takes off. It is about time we steal more market from IE.

I think firefox looks hella lot more integrated in OSX than Safari does on windows. At least it tries to have a somewhat osx-like look. Safari looks ridiculously out of place in windows and so does itunes.

Safari, imo, is a terrible browser (on Windows).

It hogs more memory than I've seen any other browser. It loads pages slower than Opera, the interface is not for me, the font rendering is crap. Also, certain pages don't work right or look right. Did I mention the fact that it's a huge memory (Virtual memory too) hog?

God damn, Apple software on Windows is MAJOR FAIL.

I will agree that Apple software ported to Windows is absolutely terrible. (iTunes, Quicktime, Safari, QUICKTIME)


However, I will say I like the ability to run Safari and render websites how they would look in OS X. The font rendering looks a lot nicer depending on what I'm viewing.

In my opinion, the font smoothing in Safari looks blurry and much harder to read.

No I loved the way it displays the web pages but I think the memory is the only let down otherwise I would use it all the time.

I liked the way Safari looked, but it was so slow. It just took 10 seconds to do what Firefox did in 2. And then sometimes you might get that "web page can't load" thingy.

I tried it again last night but didn't keep it since it was in beta. I actually liked it this time around and will definitely give it another shot when it's finalized.

Sorry for the double post, I didn't see an edit button on the first.

Safari's non-native UI didn't really bother me too much. In fact, it looked quite refreshing (despite the dull shade of grey that was all over the place). But however, like others said, it used too much memory for its own good, the fuzzy font rendering looked terrible in my eyes, and it used twice the disk space of Firefox.

And it lacks one crucial thing that Firefox has: PLUGINS!



Same here, brother, same here.

Gee, I'm liking Safari for Windows, a lot.
Sure it does not have the plug-in extensibility of FF, and it could do with the ability to change the HSV of the various widgets, and the bookmarks manager lacks some right click facility. However, I like it, and I like using it. The Find features are nice, the grammar checking, etc.

The only issue right now is that the 3.1 beta cannot log into Neowin so I will have to back up and go with 3.0.4. Which is no real problem, as I don't have to be bleeding edge.

Safari is pointless on Windows until they fix the damn memory usage. My system has 2gb of ram under Windows XP, after Safari has been open for 10 minutes its using 10% of my memory alone. It can use up to 500mb on its own, which is ridiculous. Not a problem, unless you're like many people that have a web browser open in the background while they do other stuff.

Its just not usable, no matter how fast it is.

Where have I heard this complaint before?
Oh, I know against Phoenix, now Firefox for years now. I'm betting others have heard it against Opera.
On my computer, Firefox 2.0.x through 3.0.b4 have had huge memory footprints, as has Opera. And yes, sometimes Safari will eat up to 70 MB with several tabs, but so has Firefox. And looking at them both via Task Manager, I note that Safari seems to release ram when minimized by default, unlike Firefox.
But then both 3.0 versions, whether Firefox or Safari are in beta and issues like that must be expected.

The other night I noticed for the first time my Firefox was at 200mb but that was open for like 6 hours so not bad.

How are you even supposed to even get the safari nightly builds to run? I was expecting a full safari build in there. Do I need to install Safari first? This is weird. Thanks.

<edit> Yeah had to install Safari first..figured it out.</edit>