alang
I’m only 19 so I still live with my parents. I have a blackBook. They have a Dell Dimension desktop. They don’t have a very good Dell Desktop though. Celeron 2.38 Ghz, 140GB HD, integrated graphics, XP Pro, 1 Gig RAM, DVD - R and a 17″ flat panel. Pretty run-of-the-mill Windows desktop. I was waiting for laundry downstairs (where the computer is located) in the den and was far too lazy to travel the two floors to my MacBook. I decided it was the perfect opportunity to finally see for myself what all of the negativity in relation to Safari 3 for Windows was all about.
So, I used Firefox to download Safari 3 (in about a minute or so). Three or four minutes later I was opening Safari, expecting to be let down. I wasn’t. In fact, to be perfectly honest, I enjoyed the experience. It was much faster than Firefox and IE7 both. It loaded GMail perfectly as well as some other complex websites like a couple of my banking things, credit card sites and paypal. I even threw an AJAX app at it, just to see (Oh how I hate browser-based apps though) what would happen (I fully expected a crash). Perfect.
Safari 3.0.2. No bugs on a bargain bin Dell. Give it a try. Resist the urge to think/say/post things like “It doesn’t have any skins or addons! [Though I love Foxytunes as much as the next guy, get a life]” or “The fonts are too blurry [You can turn the smoothing off in preferences]“.
I didn’t use 3.0.0, and I want to know how much better this release is than the first issue. Did they fix much of what needed fixing? What still needs to be done?
17 Comments »
I was really surprised by 3.0.2. 0.0 and 0.1 seem to be a bad joke to me, but the actual version is really stable so far and runs fast. There are still some problems or annyoing things like it’s not possible to use your forward- and backward-buttons on your mouse to go back to the previous site, but they still work on it, I hope.
I hope that they make futher improvements because I’m waiting for Safari on Windows for years.
Nice review, good job!
I’d like bookmarks keywords, so you can type one letter into the location bar and the site will come up. I’d like Firefox keyboard shortcuts. I’d like all of the text in the location bar to be selected when you click on it. I’d like and plugin to change the skin a la iTunes.
But that’s just a few things. I’m really impressed. It’s fast and looks good. I’ve abandoned Firefox now. Shame, it’s a great browser, but I do prefer the general feel of Safari. I look forward to the time when all these bugs have been ironed out, and it’s as advanced as iTunes is now, compared to when it first launched on Windows.
… YAY! no crashes anymore… the bookmarks are stable
i’m running vista and it runs perfect! i’m very happy now… good job apple
Nice review. Could’ve been better, more scenarios, but it still works.
I’m even using Safari while typing this, and it’s (I think) the most perfect browser… Well, that’s not exactly true, but I don’t want to discourage the readers.
Cool, just gsve me a reason to boot my Windows computer again (just did a fresh wipe because of a trojan, couldn’t kill the thing; took about 4 hours to get all of my drivers installed and fully up-to-date, I hate Windows) and install it.
Okay, I did a few tests (sorry for the double post). I opened up Opera and opened up Safari on my Windows PC. I then decided to load various pages onto each and compare speeds. Some were heavily javascript, some had a lot of flash, and others were just extremely long pages (AKA 180 kb of pure text and html table rendering). What I noticed is that Opera consistently loaded pages faster. The only page that they seemed to tie on was apple.com. So, speed wise, it’s no where near is fast in my tests.
If I still had my password to write blog posts I would write about this guy who does benchmark browser tests, he also found Opera (and even Firefox surprisingly) faster than Safari for Windows, the only difference was that he used numbers that he got from programs that recorded the data.
There ARE bugs. It doesn’t work correctly with Russian pages.
3.0.2 works perfect, also with russian pages
“It doesn’t work correctly with Russian pages.”
However, I am not Russian so it doesn’t bother me!
If you search for this problem you will find lots of articles saying that I’m right. Safari doesn’t show right fonts Russian fonts in bold and very often show the error screen.
Moreover when it crashes even when you open apple website.
Works almost perfectly now (only thing which still isn’t working is saving your preferences).
Oh, one more thing… any idea how to use safariblock on safari for windows?
And the letters still look blurry. In pref you only can set the smoothing to Light… not off, as I would wish it.
Well, I am among those who criticized the 0.0 e 0.1 for being unusable, due to missing text and simply too many errors in building the layout of webpages. The 0.2 release, I must admit, solved all of those problems. Still a bit unstable, occasionally crashes (the rest of my XP system can be rock solid for weeks), but i think they can work on this issues and solve them soon. Good Job Apple.
My main beef with Safari is that it jacks with blogging. As in, when I submit or edit a post, I’m lucky if the text I entered actually goes through. More often than not, I click “save” and it shows me a blank entry.
That, and I’d really love to be able to hit “delete” and browse backwards.
Otherwise, I’m perfectly happy with it. I’ll probably be happier with later versions, though.
I did some testing an Safari is actually the fastest
I timed how long it would take to open and load the MSN Homepage from the following browseres: Safari, Mozzila FF, Internet Explorer
1. Safari 00:00:04.508
2. I.E. 00:00:06.166
3. Moz.FF 00:00:07.531
-Apple Wins Again
What about Opera?
The 0.0 and 0.1 builds were usable for me but still buggy (what with the bookmarks and such). This 0.3 build, however, seems really stable so far. Safari also started up faster than any of the two other browsers I use (Firefox and Opera).