Safari Beta for Windows Vista/XP

[artdutra04]

Originally Posted by GeeForce

Posting from Safari here too.

I must say I really like it, save for a few things. No status bar at the bottom no more mousing over links to find out where they go, I guess? Also, no extensions (obviously) means no more FoxyTunes, Weather, etc. Just a nice convenience I'd gotten used to.

I'll probably end up going back to the ol' Fox for main web browsing, but the speedy and aesthetically appealing Safari works well for quick jogs (a quick email check or something), since my way-too-extensioned-out FF takes a bit to load.

To view the status bar, just go to "View" -> "Show Status Bar". (It's the same thing in Firefox.)

Here's a few of my observations about it:

I have a few font issues on my main desktop computer with regards to Safari 3 beta. I had to remove one of my custom fonts (I never used it anyway) to get Safari to render [mostly] correctly. There are still a few sites though where I now get "invisible" text. Perhaps it's because I have over a thousand fonts installed and another one of them is causing a problem...

They need to lighten up their UI, and make it more of a lighter color like Finder in Mac OSX Tiger or Leopard. It's annoying to read the text on the status bar and tabs.

When they advertise a speed increase, they really mean it if you are using very heavy HTML- and Javascript-laden pages. I dusted off a few animation Javascript effects I wrote in the past just to test the speed that Safari rendered them at, and it was blazingly fast, even when compared to Firefox. Otherwise, unless you are using heavy Javascript/AJAX, the speed increase isn't that much noticeable.

All in all, it's cool and interesting. It has sweet CSS3 support, but it still needs a lot of work to get it out of Beta. Until then, I'll keep using Firefox my primary browser, but I'll still keep Safari installed.