One of the announcements made by Steve Jobs in WWDC was the availability of Safari Web Browser on Windows. As soon as I saw the news (it was around 1AM IST), I was tempted to try it out.
The windows installable is around 8MB. The Browser setup optionally installs the following components:
- Bonjour Networking Service
- Apple Update Software
According to Apple, Safari loads pages up to 2 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2.
Also Safari executes JavaScript up to 2.8 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2.
When I loaded web pages on Safari, I didn’t see any considerable change in web load speeds compared to Firefox. However there was some notable difference in JavaScript execution. Here are the 12 reasons that will make you love Safari !
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One of the unique feature in Safari is Private Browsing; a mode in which no record of information about the user’s web activity is retained. The option can be enabled from the “Edit” Menu.
Note that the download is Alpha release and not even a Beta. Just with 5 tabs open in the browser, Safari almost gobbled around 140MB of memory on my system. Also when I opened few secure sites, Safari crashed and worse , there is no option to restore the crashed session.
I dumped Internet Explorer long back and have been a fan of Firefox since then. Flock did try to take me away from Firefox, but it failed due to various reasons.
Safari looks like a good alternative to Firefox and probably will switch once a stable release is available :).
Will you switch to Safari ?
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Though I have installed safari to check how my blog looks in Safari but I feel Opera is much faster than Safari from my experience (atleast for me). Opera is going to be my primary browser and Firefox as secondary. 🙂
Ah still with opera .. Every time I hear about opera, I do open it once and try it out. somehow not comfortable using it. Not sure why :).
It is fast, no doubt about that, but there is something wrong in the UI and the page rendering (font etc) which drags me back to Firefox.
I have never faced any problems with opera. 😀 And that’s the reason why I have been using it all these years right from version 5.0 (if my memory is correct). I am very much comfortable with UI as well as I have got used to it and there are some remarkable features in opera. May be I should write a post about that. 😆
Oh man.. am at the write place.. Opera lovers.. 😀
Venu, check out the memory usage in case of Safari..a total let down on that front, so much that I instantly took a snapshot with Opera running the same web pages too. Compare that here!
Damn how about the fonts rendering on Safari?
Yup there are a lot of opera lovers out there.. I know one big opera fan who shifted to firefox 🙂
Yeah safari is taking lot of memory, but i am expecting it to correct in the stable release.
Regarding fonts, I did read in a few places where they saw fonts getting screwed, but I had no issues.
Guess apple fixed it silently 🙂
Nopes Venu, its not just about the fonts getting screwed in an ad hoc manner, but the fundamental that they have used in rendering. Windows IE uses ClearType for fonts whereas Apple doesn’t seem as they are using the same. As a result, if you zoom your page, you can see the jagged saw toothed edges on the font.
P.S: I downloaded safari today itself, so I guess Apple folks haven’t yet fixed it. It isn’t really a bug, but the technology itself.
Well, I checked out this Windows Safari, it’s nice. However, I still prefer Firefox and Google Chrome for their add-ons.