On a Safari

As most of you no doubt know, Safari (Apple’s web browser) has just been released in Version 3 Beta. Good for OS X users, right? Well, good for Windows XP/Vista users too, actually. Apple has released the beta for Mac OS X and for the first time, a Windows client mirroring its features.

Safari is based off WebKit, which is based off KHTML. It’s got a solid opensource foundation, and as a Mac user, I can tell you it’s fast. It’s always been fast. It’s faster than a man using the bathroom during a micro-ad in a sports game. It’s that fast. Of course, Apple knows this, and is waving the benchmarks around like a kid who’s just won the Turnaround award in school. He’s got skills, and he wants the whole school to know. According to the benchmarks, Safari is over 2 times faster at rendering pages than is Internet Explorer 7, and also faster than Firefox and Opera. It really IS fast.

Logically, this means Safari 3 Beta on Mac or Windows is a good thing, correct? Er.. Well I swear if it weren’t for “beta”, it would be. But it’s very much a beta. My time with the Windows client has been limited (thank God I am a Mac user), but for me it was pretty good. Apparently others have not been so lucky. I would suggest you try it out on your own and see how your experience is. The browser is fast no matter how you slice it, and its features are great. It just needs some polish.

It just needs some a lot of polish, actually. The Mac version of the beta was excellent. It gave me all the features I have been wanting in Safari for some time. While maybe not groundbreaking, it’s nice to have them all in one nice browser. Again, stability was an issue. I should clarify, however, it was not Safari’s stability that was the issue, it was Microsoft Messenger. The app would not stay running so long as Safari 3 was installed. This was a bummer.

Two things you really need to know: Safari is fast on both platforms; Safari is in beta on both platforms. But you have to admit, even with everyone finding all these bugs already, the concept of “beta” is really working quickly for Apple.