Wow. That was unexpected. They’re advertising it as faster than Firefox and IE.
I’m posting this under Safari in Windows. It’s very nice - fast and slick. The preferences screens all have a fake-OS X theme going on, but the menus and drop-downs don’t match. Kind of weird. I feel like I’m dreaming.
It’s very nice, though - fast and slick. The search feature is especially cool.
There is also a public beta out for Safari 3 on OS X.
I’m trying to figure out why they’d do this. I suppose they think that, if people are impressed by Safari on Windows, they might consider switching entirely to Apple. Seems a little weak. Maybe Jobs has something else up his sleave?
Woah, I’m actually really liking this. It does seem very fast compared to Firefox and IE.
The coolest feature of all has got to be the search, but I just discovered something else: you can adjust the size of text boxes on any website just by clicking in the corner and dragging. The page layout updates to match.
Haven’t downloaded it yet, but word on the street is that they released it for Windows so developers will be more comfortable making sites/applications for Safari for use on the iPhone. Pretty cool… I wish I had a Windows machine to test it on!
How do you adjust the size of the browser? Usually my browser is a quarter of one monitor, this takes up the whole screen with no option I could find to grab and shrink.
Heh, I’ve got a windows machine here at work but I can’t install Safari myself because the crack ITS squad here has all of them locked down tighter than ticks on a hog because of all the nasty things you can catch from teh intarwebs. Ironically, the lucky few that have Macs here have full admin rights on them.
Good. Maybe this will encourage the FireFox team to pick up the slack on all those memory leaks and we’ll see some real speed competition. I love Safari, but FireFox has a couple of can’t-miss extensions and I’m hooked for good. But I have no delusions that FireFox is particularly fast. Back before it hit 1.0 and maybe even up to 1.5, it was pretty speedy, but now it’s just a regular ol’ browser that follows all the web standards it should.
Pages simply render a lot faster, especially complex ones with lots of Javascript and formatting. Cached pages load practically instantly - I literally blinked and missed the transition once, and it took me a second to realize the page had loaded.
The search feature dims the screen and highlights all the occurrences of the word you’re searching for.
“Faster” in browser-speak means that it loads and renders faster because it doesn’t have as much “overhead” as other browsers. Even with your set up, you should notice a difference, though, not necessarily. I’ve got broadband, but the bare minimum RAM for XP, and I didn’t notice it being any faster than Opera. Of course, I’ve got something running in the background that’s pegging my machine almost constantly, and unfortunately, I’ve been unable to figure out what it is, so I can kill it.
I don’t see the point myself. Even when I’m running OS X, 99% of the time I’m in Firefox. The only time I switch to Safari is for websites that simply will not work properly (most of the time it’s a Java thing) in Firefox. Needless to say, I will not be installing Safari on my XP box at home.
Well, I’ve discovered a couple of interesting things about Safari that might cause some problems for folks[ul]
[li]You can’t enable proxies in it yet.[/li][li]Parental controls doesn’t work yet.[/li][li]It can’t import bookmarks automatically, you have to point it at the right folder, and it doesn’t seem to recognize Opera bookmarks at all.[/li][li]For some reason it seems to think IE is the default browser on my machine, no matter how many times I tell it otherwise.[/li][li]Downloading a file with it seems to automatically dump the file to the desktop. If there’s a way to pick the destination on the fly, I don’t know what it is.[/li][/ul]
I’ll add another annoyance to the list: For some reason when I access my Gmail account via the web, it won’t let me right click on links in emails, it just automatically launches the link in a new window, when every other browser pops up a menu and let’s me choose what I want to do next.
I downloaded the OSX version and gave it about twenty minutes…
Nothing special, but it still delivers the goods with a bit of polish, like current Safari. Draggable tabs are nice, and now it warns you if you are closing the windows (much too easy to do by accident in Mac land with a command-Q instead of a command-W).
Of course, I didn’t see anything special that FF didn’t do ages ago.
One major gap I still see is the lack of mouse gestures. I use them all the time with FF at work, and Opera has them built in. Why not a slick browser like Safari?
My biggest gripe that kept me from using the beta is that PithHelmet is not compatible yet. That plugin is the only one I really care about — it’s kind of like AdBlock in the FF world. Without PithHelmet, I was suddenly faced with ads. Ugh.
So I reverted back to V2.
I didn’t notice any phenomenal speed increases, but of course I didn’t surf too much with it.
Anyway, I’ll be installing it on my Windows machine at work tomorrow
For any Mac users contemplating installing it, I recommend checking out Apple’s forumsbefore you do the install. It seems some folks have been having some pretty serious issues with it.
Ewwwww. That pisses me off faster than just about anything. I hate it when I don’t get to specify where my file is going. And just about the LAST place I would want it would be on the desktop!
