No Jokes, Please: Safari for (*gasp*!) Windows First Impressions


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If you're a Mac/OS X fan, you know all about Safari. If you spend most of your time (like I do) on Windows, you may have *heard* about it, but since it has been Mac-only all its life you dismissed it.

Well, *undismiss it*.

Apple's Web browser has Officially Invaded Bill Gates' Windows. (In fact, I'm typing these words from a Safari tab on my Vista Ultimate-driven home-built PC.)

The Good: It's fast. VERY fast. It's easily the fastest browser at page rendering I've seen for Windows. Ever. (And yes, I am including both Opera 9 and Firefox 3 alpha.) What's all the more shocking is that I don't exactly have lickety-split hardware by any means.

The Bad: It doesn't mesh with *any* Windows UI (it is available for both XP and Vista, but it still looks like a typical Apple application (iTunes)); however, depending on how important this is to you, it may be only a quibble or quirk. Also, it's *very* minimalist; however, that can be a good thing if all you are looking for is a minimal browser as an alternative to the Browser Suites (not just IE, but even Firefox with it's treasure chest of add-ons, plug-ins, and themes).

The Upshot: It won't replace IE (my long-time default browser); however, it makes for a killer (and hyper-driven) minimalist alternative when All I Want To Do Is Browse.

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The Good: It's fast. VERY fast. It's easily the fastest browser at page rendering I've seen for Windows. Ever. (And yes, I am including both Opera 9 and Firefox 3 alpha.)

how strange. i've got admuncher injecting a *lot* of adblocking code into every page i visit with opera 9 and found it to still be faster than safari. got rid of it in about 15 minutes.

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how strange. i've got admuncher injecting a *lot* of adblocking code into every page i visit with opera 9 and found it to still be faster than safari. got rid of it in about 15 minutes.

What hardware are you running, and which version of Windows?

Also, all ad-blocking software (including AdMuncher) *should* reduce page-rendering times (a blocked ad isn't rendered). In order to make a fair browser comparison, they should be in the same state (without any unique add-ons or plug-ins) and running on the same operating system.

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What hardware are you running, and which version of Windows?

Also, all ad-blocking software (including AdMuncher) *should* reduce page-rendering times (a blocked ad isn't rendered). In order to make a fair browser comparison, they should be in the same state (without any unique add-ons or plug-ins) and running on the same operating system.

shen said:

how strange. i've got admuncher injecting a *lot* of adblocking code into every page i visit with opera 9 and found it to still be faster than safari. got rid of it in about 15 minutes.

I took that to mean that Opera running with admuncher was faster than Safari by itself.

I'll be trying it soon enough on my Vista box and will report my experience then.

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I love it, It looks and feels so much better and quicker. I think it would be better if we could change the colour of the grey top.

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The UI succeeds in making me ****ed off at Apple and their defiance to even try to make it fit in even a little with the OS. iTunes and Quicktime both irk me to the same end. Why the hell can't Apple just let Windows draw the damned non-client area and controls? It has these features for a reason.

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looks out of place, double clicking the address in the adress bar doesnt highlight it all, can't double click the tab bar (or middle click it) to open a new tab. So what if it does render faster (didn't seem faster to me) if it takes 3x the clicks to change the address, and have to go through a menu to make a new tab!

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I installed it, nothing would work with it.

Could not even type in an address in the address bar, just went border line blue.

Went to uninstall it, could not find an uninstall file for it so restored a backup before installing it.

Bill, mail me when it works.

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looks out of place, double clicking the address in the adress bar doesnt highlight it all, can't double click the tab bar (or middle click it) to open a new tab. So what if it does render faster (didn't seem faster to me) if it takes 3x the clicks to change the address, and have to go through a menu to make a new tab!

I agree, its just not functional

So I am really not impressed at all, mostly disappointed

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I've just tested it, and it's not fast. It's jittery.

Back to firefox. Although I will come back and test it again once it comes out Final.

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I've just tested it, and it's not fast. It's jittery.

Back to firefox. Although I will come back and test it again once it comes out Final.

I feel the same way about it, I will try to final.

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I used it all day yesterday and my impression so far is: not as fast as advertised and pretty damn ugly out of the box. I just dont like that Safari look..too square/rectanguloid and metallic...skins will fix that tho. So far I really dont know why Id keep it, but Ill leave it installed for at least a month..maybe itll grow on me.

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I installed it on my laptop at work, but after I enter my user/pass for the proxyserver, Safari crashes. So it's pretty useless at work because it only can show intranet sites, not internet sites.

We use a intranet program called TOPdesk and it isn't properly rendered, and it crashes after a while. So it's really unusable for me.

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The UI succeeds in making me ****ed off at Apple and their defiance to even try to make it fit in even a little with the OS. iTunes and Quicktime both irk me to the same end. Why the hell can't Apple just let Windows draw the damned non-client area and controls? It has these features for a reason.

+1

Infact I wish all these developers that insist on defining their own look for the window, toolbars and general gui, fair enough. Just let all the windows look the same!

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its okay, nothing really makes me want to switch over from FF though while a lot makes me want to stick to FF.

it looks horrible with windows... i mean, itunes and quicktime are bad enough but you hardly ever really look at the UI (listen to music on itunes and watch full screen videos on quicktime) so you can just ignore the strange appearance. with safari though its supposed to be a web browser and i have FF open 24/7. i just couldn't put up with a UI that ugly compared to FF which conforms with the windows UI.

it also has properly rounded corners which really bug me, to close a window i usually just flick the mouse up and right into the corner, and if i do that with safari it closes the window behind. full screen should mean the rounded corners are removed, but they aren't...

the font doesn't display well on my screen... it hurts to read text on there.

i didn't find it all that much faster, it rendered pages equally as fast as FF for me, but it doesn't have all the extensions i use for FF so i'd say it probably renders slower...

so overall, i didn't like it :p i'll try the final though... hopefully they'll have fixed some of the bugs by then. until then it'll be useful for seeing if pages load properly in safari.

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I hate how it has so few buttons and its so hard to do common taks like wirk with tabs -all on a Mac where at least it fits in with the OS. Not going to trying it on Windows until its final, and only for testing like Opera.

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What hardware are you running, and which version of Windows?

Also, all ad-blocking software (including AdMuncher) *should* reduce page-rendering times (a blocked ad isn't rendered). In order to make a fair browser comparison, they should be in the same state (without any unique add-ons or plug-ins) and running on the same operating system.

dell inspiron 8600 laptop running xpsp2. can't remember the exact specs.

and really, looking at it, admuncher adds several pages (scroll-wise) of blocking code into everything, sometimes to only block one or two little areas. i disabled it and found the speeds to be about the same, so i figured it would make more sense to mention that opera was still faster, even processing all the css and whatnot that admuncher is throwing in there.

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Generally, I can't see it really being used by anyone but developers and people who normally use Mac's with Safari and are occasionally booting Windows. Everyone else either has already found an alternative browser, or doesn't know what a browser is and uses IE.

Generally, I can't see it really being used by anyone but developers and people who normally use Mac's with Safari and are occasionally booting Windows. Everyone else either has already found an alternative browser, or doesn't know what a browser is and uses IE.

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I installed it and then after a minute.. I uninstalled it.

A browser that can't even render basic pages without crashing on you and messing up the layout, poses no threat to established browser giants.

Maybe in ten years though.

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My experience with safari has been very good. I have Vista Ultimate X64 with 4gb of ram. Is fast and stable so far in my system, no a single crash yet.

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I installed it and for that first day I used it, it ran fine. The second day it was installed everything started going wrong with it. Pages wouldn't render right, memory usage went from the original 2,700kb to 126mb's and the font smoothing started to really get to my eyes. On my system it was the slowest browser installed. Fastest browser on my system is IE 7 and I'd say IE 7 was rendering 4x faster than Safari.

It ran more like an ALPHA release than a BETA and I think a lot of people would agree there. I don't think it was anywhere near ready for a BETA release. I tried the 3.0.1 and had all the same exact issues except minimize/maximize wasn't choppy.

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I installed it and it worked 100% fine, page rendering was very quick but I'm not convinced about the ui in a windows environment.

I'll stick to IE7 and firefox for now but I will be interested in trying it when the it reaches final.

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