Safari Browser for Windows

To kick-off my blog, I'd like to share my thoughts on the *new* Safari 3 Browser (Beta) for Windows.
As you might have heard, the Safari browser has finally made its way to the Windows operating system and to be honest, so far, I have very mixed feelings about it.

After downloading it, I was excited to try it out; judging from its excellent reputation on the Mac, I was expecting something that would completely annihilate Firefox. To my surprise, however, what I saw was rather displeasing.

What annoys me above all is the way it renders text. If you've tried IE7 before, you might have noticed that the text is a bit peculiar; this is all due to Microsoft's text-rendering technology 'ClearType'. If you've got a fine eye for detail like me, this new technology would have been more of a downfall than a benefit. Actually, my first Google search after downloading IE7 went something along the lines of "IE7 turning off blurry text." Anyway, as I started up Safari for the first time, I was shocked. Until that point, I could have sworn that font-rendering was just a one-off fad by Microsoft, I had never thought that it would actually be replicated ever again. Not only was Safari's font a replica of the ClearType disaster, but it was even worse. The text in Safari 3 Beta for Windows literally looked blurry, so much so that I'm still puzzled by why a huge company like Apple would integrate it in their very first browser for the Windows platform. Not only is it ugly, but, to my surprise, it can't be turned off!!! That was perhaps the biggest downfall... I mean, first of all; they fail to make a decent text-rendering system, then, to top it all, they will not allow me to turn it off! Why did they even release this Beta? They're just turning away potential users even before they get the real version. To me, it's just money down the drain.

Another problem that I found with Safari is the graphical user interface... Hello!!! I'm using Windows, I don't want a Mac interface! Not only is the look out of place with Windows, but it's pretty plain and boring. That being said, I like how the browser displays buttons, check-boxes and the like; Mac style does have a place in a Windows environment but it needs to have boundaries. I find that the top bar in Safari just takes it too far; it doesn't feel like Windows and on a semi-conscious level, it reminds me of the Netscape browser and that's not a very nice image.

One major aspect of this browser that I really enjoy, though, is the loading. Seriously, it's a beauty; it's like a perfect compromise between Firefox's progressive loading and IE's all-at-once approach. I find that in Firefox, for many pages, pretty much as soon as you press 'Enter' in the address bar, the content of that page starts to load, in fact, it sets-off so quickly that sometimes the content doesn't even get the time to format itself properly. IE, on the other hand is on the other side of the equation; it takes much longer to load, but at least, when it's done, the content is pretty much all ready. In brief, Safari is a bit closer to IE, but the way it loads content is more free-flowing and it's MUCH faster. I really never envisaged that it would make such a great difference in speed!

I will be looking forward to the complete version of Safari for Windows, hoping that they'll have fixed-up at least some of the major problems which I highlighted in this post.