All the geeks are talking about Safari for Windows (Apple's web browser, available until this week only on Macs). I downloaded it the day it became available because I'm slowly becoming Mac Fanboy. They suck you in with that iPod and then the iPhone and it's only a matter of time before you're hanging out at their Genuis Bar sipping the Kool-Aid and sneering at the fools in the suits lugging around their Dell laptops...wait, where was I?
Oh right, the Safari Beta.
I'm not crazy about it. The benchmarks Apple put out say it's faster than IE, which I don't necessarily see. I've been trying it in a bunch of different formats and it seems to be middle-of-the-road on performance. Most things work like I'd expect, with probably the exception of the space bar not submitting buttons like it does in Firefox and IE. While that might not be a big deal for you and yours, I do a lot of my work with keyboard shortcuts and I'm wired to think of the space bar as submitting forms, so it frustrates me.
One thing that a lot of people have been talking about is the rendering of fonts. My experience is that you either love how Apple does fonts or you don't. There's no middle-ground, and Safari's the same way. The fonts in Safari on Windows looks close to how they do on a Mac, which I like. You might not. If you don't, that's okay too. Nobody's forcing this browser on you. Go use Opera or Firefox of IE. They're all fine browsers.
Other things I've noted. I tried to download a bunch of pictures from http://thefunniest.info yesterday and Safari told me that it had downloaded the pictures but I'll be damned if I can find them. Anywhere...
There's also some talk about how some security experts have found a series of zero-day bugs and exploits in Safari. Really folks, that's not a surprise. It is a public beta, after all. That means there's going to be bugs, like the pictures downloading, and security holes. Also, Mac's and Windows are different under the covers, it's not entirely surprising to to me that some security practices that should have been followed on Windows were not. I'm sure it will get fixed.
Another interesting thing I've noted is that some sites have turned off a bunch of JavaScript functionality (notably GMail) for the Safari browser which means some extra hoops to jump through. I'm honestly suprised by this, as Safari is the built-in browser on Macs and Apple's market share is growing. I don't know all of the specifics because I don't normally target the Safari browser when programming. Maybe Safari lags the other browsers in functionality. Speaking of which, I'd love to see if there is a difference between the Mac and Windows version as far as rendering is concerned. Could I use the Windows version to develop against and be certain that works on Safari for Windows will work the same on Macs? Can anyone point me to a breakdown?
Anyway. I don't know that Safari will become my browser all the time. Given no great increase in speed, or increase in functionality, I don't see a need to jump from Firefox. Maybe the next rev will deliver more, but I'm certainly going to keep playing with it.
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