Review of Safari for Windows after a few months of use
It is SO damn close. It’s fast, faster than firefox even. (Though to be fair, I have plugins in FF that I don’t have in Safari.) Safari renders webpages well. It’s compliant. And I reallyreallyreally want a compliant browser that isn’t beholden to a search engine (like firefox is to google) for development funds, which just bothers the hell out of me since I’m just a bit skeeved about what might be under firefox’s hood now that this funding situation exists and it appears that Google is pulling some strings. Not to mention the oddities that have begun to show up in FF, and the ever present memory leak which, though not as much of a biggie on my newest box, will still eventually crash and burn after some multi tab abuse involving flash in different tabs. And I’ve just never been that crazy about Opera, so . . . I really gave Safari a real try. A serious try. Over and over again.
But the few things they didn’t address in Safari, because it was originally a MAC product are annoying. And actually I find the same things annoying when I use my IBook for testing or I’m travelling with it. So if Apple is looking to develop some crossover traffic, or not piss off people using Safari in their IPhones who aren’t otherwise Mac users, they might want to pay attention to the things that don’t sit well with this (primarily) windows user.
First and foremost, and unarguably the MOST annoying difference between Safari and other browsers on Windows– when I click my mouse into the location bar, I expect the URL to be completely highlighted, the way it is in every other Windows browser when I perform that action. That way I can start typing another url, or copy the address easily. I don’t have to do anything else to do that, like move the damn mouse while holding the button or using the delete or back button to do what I want to do. It’s already done with one click. I just can’t tell you how utterly bothersome it is to be trying to use Safari in my daily work flow and to run into that wall . . . which stops the workflow as I curse at a browser in Windows that doesn’t act like any other browser in Windows. This is something I’ve done for years, so don’t expect me to change this habit just so I can use your browser.
Where’s the “new tab” button? why do I have to use a dropdown or the keyboard to get there?
Font rendering is “thick”. Looks funny.
Why does it open maximized even if I never run that way on my 1600 x 1200 resolution? Why doesn’t it remember how big it was when I closed it, like all my other programs do?
The scrollbar doesn’t work the way I expect it to, the way all other programs do. Why should I retrain myself to use a different scrollbar just to use this program? Simple answer. I won’t.
None of these things (except the first one) is a dealbreaker in and of itself. But if you’re designing a program to work on different platforms, you need to respect the conventions of the different platforms you’re creating the program’s UI for in each case. Otherwise you piss off the users of that platform and you end up losing your potential userbase before you’ve even had a chance to win their hearts with your shinycool software which actually does function well at what it does.
So Safari will always and ever remain nothing but a testing browser for me until these things are fixed.
Technorati Tags: Safari for Windows, Standards Compliant Browsers
November 9th, 2007 at 5:00 pm
Very valid points, but here are the workarounds or “Its how to do in Safari”.
1. to have text selected in single click, click on the small blue globe (the place for favicon).
2. You can change the font smoothing in Edit -> Preferences -> Appearance tab, select “light” from the drop down and it should look less “thick”.
O yeah! it does work!
Looking forward to see the final version from Apple.
November 9th, 2007 at 5:12 pm
Well, #1 is cool, and #2 makes things better somewhat.
Maybe I’ll try it a bit more.
Annoying though that I have ITunes installed even though I don’t have (nor will I ever have) an IPod. I didn’t want that. Of course, I didn’t want the MicroSnot IM program either. The arrogance of these companies is annoying. Who are they to tell me what I install on my box? And that arrogance puts my back up so that it will ensure I NEVER use the product they’re shoving at me.
November 9th, 2007 at 5:14 pm
Oh, and for the record, you who haven’t installed it because you’re still running win2k. I successfully installed Safari on my old box, though a couple odd features didn’t work. Mostly it works fine though.