We now have another web standards compliant option for browsing in Windows– Safari! And I like it, so far.

Apparently there was some bug infestation the first few days, so I waited a couple weeks after launch to download, and yes, there were some bugfixes since it was initially released. The specs require WinXP, but I’ve got it safely installed on both my XP box and my win2k box, and it rocks on both, though I have noticed that I can’t customize the toolbar in win2k safari. I did have to reset the font “smoothing” on both XP and win2k, since it looked pretty crappy at the default setting.

What I like about it–

• It’s FAST. FAST. FAST.
• It’s standards compliant, like firefox and opera.
• It offers tabbed browsing.
• Firefox bookmarks INSTANTLY imported without any action from me.
• Built in RSS reader.
• Did I mention it’s UltraFAST?
• Font rendering is cool, once I got it set to my taste, certainly much better than FF, Opera and IE6, though IE7 is better than Safari (probably the **only** thing IE7 is superior at!)

What I don’t like–

• Can’t customize my toolbar to add a “new tab” button. They do have a shortcut key combo though, so I guess I can get used to this.
• I hate “shiny.”
• Form buttons look like prescription pills. I hate that.
• It’s missing FireFox Extensions that I use almost everyday, like the WebDev toolbar, Aardvark, HTML Validator, Colorzilla, Measure-it . . . etc.

Anyway, I figure I’ll try it for a few days and see how it goes. So far so good. It is definitely NOTICEABLY faster than Firefox, which surprises me. The reason we all switched to FF in the first place was its speed (well, security too, but mostly speed) but I guess as it’s gotten more bloated that’s not been kept up during updates to FF. So far I haven’t noticed too many sites horrendously broken, though I’m sure I’ll come across a few, since Safari has always been known to be stricter, and doesn’t tolerate broken code as well as the others.

For those who just want a faster browser and don’t care about extensions, this is DEFINITELY worth a test drive!

Technorati Tags: Standards Compliant Windows Browser, Safari for Windows, Fast windows browser

This entry was posted on Monday, July 2nd, 2007 at 8:43 pm and is filed under Web News, Web Standards, the Semantic Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.