Tuesday, June 12, 2007
First Impressions of Safari for Windows
Apple introduced Safari 3 beta for Windows today. Formerly Mac-only, the Safari browser is now available for XP and Vista machines.
After an initial reaction of “why?”, as it doesn’t seem likely Safari will gain market share on IE or Firefox, it is nice for Windows-only developers who want to build Safari-compatible applications. Apple is currently promoting Safari as a type of developing environment for the upcoming iPhone (Wired’s take).
If the Windows version does render webpages exactly like it’s Mac counterpart, it’s at least useful for Windows-based developers if nothing else.
After a quick install, I now have a Safari icon on my desktop right below the Opera “O”.
So, nothing too in-depth yet, but a couple of quick first impressions.
Font smoothing has looked horrible on three machines I’ve installed it on (two XP, one 2003 - and yes, Safari is not listed for 2003). Two had cleartype on to begin with, so I’m not sure why font smoothing needs to be on over that, but I’ve looked at it on other machines as well and it’s just fuzzy everywhere. CRT, LCD, cleartype or nothing. I’ve set it to “light” to keep pages as readable as possible. I’m surprised there’s no option to just turn it off. If font smoothing looks good for anyone, I’d like to know what your setup is.
Memmmmmmory. Safari inflates fast. No browser has good memory management for me. Firefox, my preference, leaks like crazy, but I do have a number of add-ons installed. Safari also wants all my memory to perform any actions. It spikes hard on actions. To test, just open up your task manager, a webpage in Safari and then mouseover some links (even just text links with hover actions). IE doesn’t exactly excel here, but if you have a lot running in the background, Safari seems to cause the biggest pause out of the three.
The status bar is so dark it’s barely readable. I can’t recall what it looks like on a Mac, but I do remember that it’s not on by default.
I wouldn’t mind the addition of a few more common shortcuts used by other browsers.
If you’ve got a solid connection, rendering speed can be noticably faster with Safari on heavy pages.
I’ve crashed it a few times on 2003. It wasn’t made for that, but I should point out I’ve had no problems with my other browsers. Still, a beta product on an OS it’s not supposed to be on, so I’ll have to overlook that.
However, I’ve also crashed it a couple of times on XP with normal browsing.
A few frivolous quirks aside, Safari is still a beta product. It can wind up being a nice browsing experience, especially for multi-OS users who aren’t addicted to Firefox already, but I’m not too sure how many of those there are and outside of developers, there’s not much of a pull to download it yet.
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Misheard Lyrics
While I get good Youtube links every day, once in a while I’m reminded as to why user created content is truly great.
I’m over a month late to the party, but Misheard Lyrics: Pearl Jam - Yellow Ledbetter is just hysterical: