Safari 3.0 for Windows (beta)
When Steve Jobs announced the beta for the Apple Safari 3.0 browser for Windows XP and Vista, the first thought on many minds was "Do we need it?" On a Mac, Apple Safari excels in some important areas--speed, rendering, standards compliance--but offers very few plug-ins, doesn't preview tabs, and doesn't preview linked URLs. When the final version comes out, Safari 3.0 will likely compete directly with and make things harder for the Opera community, but will draw little from the existing Firefox and Internet Explorer user base.
The public beta offers three download choices: Safari plus Quicktime for Windows XP and Vista; Safari for Windows XP and Vista; and Safari for Mac OS 10.4.9 or later. We downloaded the first option and had Safari up and running within minutes. One choice during setup will be unfamiliar to most Windows users. On a Mac, Apple's Bonjour protocol finds the local IP address of all devices such as your network printer. Bonjour works the same on a Windows machine.
The plastic look and feel of Safari is distinctively Apple. If you use iTunes, the font and colors of the Safari bookmarks will be familiar. If you highlight a word on any page and then right-click, you get an option to search with Google. On the browser itself, you can set the default search to be with either Google or Yahoo--far fewer choices than with Internet Explorer or Firefox. Without prompting, Safari sucked in all our bookmarks from IE and Firefox. With Safari, you can make any tab its own window. But if you close any Safari window, you lose all your tabs. Only Firefox 2 offers session restore, restoring your tab session as it was.
Safari 3.0 comes with pages for Apple, Amazon, eBay, and Yahoo, and newsfeeds from Google, CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, NPR, and CNET News.com preinstalled on the toolbar. Under bookmarks, Apple includes a hundred more sites, such as National Geographic, Accuweather.com, and TV Guide, all grouped by category.
On standards, Safari rocks. It has passed what is called the Acid2 test, a test designed by the Web Standards Project. And, if you believe Apple, it renders pages twice as fast as Internet Explorer.
In the end, Safari 3.0 beta is a mixed bag. There are some good features, but current Firefox and Internet Explorer users will likely be frustrated by the lack of add-ons and other user interface concerns. And, less than twenty-four hours after its public release, three security researchers have found at least eight significant flaws within the Safari for Windows browser.
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These toolbars are all blank.
I uninstalled it immediately.
Looks like this beta is a loooooong way from completion.
It doesn't have anything near the customization as Firefox, or even the now basic "quick-tabs" preview available in Internet Explorer 7. It certainly doesn't feel any faster than Opera 9.1 which is incredibly fast. The software seems just completely hallow -- like a shell of a Internet Browser.
Apple's got a long LONG way, before they think that offering their Internet Browser is going to make customers want to buy their computers. Not to mention there's no necessary need in changing browsers, for people Internet Explorer 6 works just fine, and tabs confuse them. iTunes is a hot seller because it is the necssary interface to communicate to their iPod, and it works.... pretty simple for most people. Not to mention their constant marketing.
But again, Apple has a long way to go with this "new" version of Safari.
myspace.com/jaytwo
sp2. It looks and works just the same as it does on my iMac. I'm going to use it
for awhile and see if I like it better than FF. FF is fine but it sure uses up a lot of
memory.
- Any Flash animations viewed in Safari play far slower than when played on Firefox.
- You can't use Safari to pay for a Skype account. The transaction won't go through, and you'll be requested to use another browser. Skype states this is a "known issue" with Safari. (Firefox worked just fine).
- Windows Live Hotmail won't install. Microsoft will tell you to use either IE or Firefox.
There are other limitations, but these are the most recent I've encountered. It remains to be seen how these issues are addressed under a newer version.
Uninstalling it for now, will wait for the finished product but not now......
full release, but after having to login and having it redirect me to an ad AND
receive a popup, I'm mildly disgruntled. There might be hope here, but Apple
software is notorious for being crap on Windows and good stuff on a Mac.
http://www.zolved.com/synapse/view_content/29266/Top_7_reasons_why_Safari_3_sucks
"The browser war is at its zenith and the latest entry in the field is Safari 3. Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs made a recent deliberate move, introducing a version of the Safari browser for Microsoft Windows based computers. Steve Jobs made this announcement during his address note in this week's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco." as said in Zolved
Check for a file named fonts.plist in C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Apple Computer\Safari.(XP SP2) Thats the culprit and you need one that will adapt to your font listings. Do a web search to find one then make it read only so Safari doesn't change it on reload.
safari works satisfactorily on my laptop, but has text display problems on my desktop