Safari on Windows
Before anything else, I just want to greet every Filipino out there a happy Independence Day. Seriously, I can’t feel the vibe. I haven’t received any text messages greeting me “a happy Independence Day” or read a blog entry about this very special day. Don’t tell me I got the wrong date.
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When I started surfing the internet today, the last day of my last summer vacation I came across with this headline on digg.com: Safari on Windows. I thought that Safari — the default web browser that comes along with every new Mac — was available for Windows before today. Obviously, I was wrong. But now, you can run it on your PC. Now we can tell if our blogs do break or not on Safari without buying a very expensive Mac. I tried mine and my site doesn’t look awkward or whatever. Safari renders my site almost like Firefox.
Pros:
- Cool UI. I’ve read somewhere that it gives you the feel of how Safari looks like on a Mac. Sleek!
- In my experience, almost all embedded Quicktime movies would make Firefox and IE7 crash on Windows Vista. Since Quicktime and Safari’s creator are just one, they blend smoothly.
- I really like the Private Browsing1 feature of Safari. Best used for viewing porn sites. Haha.
- Firefox greatest feature was also copied by Safari: tabbed browsing. But what’s original is that you can make an existing tab to open into a new window by just dragging it out and if you want to put all of your opened windows into just only one, you can merge them.
- There’s also a built-in pop-up blocker. That’s self explanatory.
- Text fields are resizable. No more unnecessary scrolling for text fields!
- The built-in RSS is astounding, but that does not mean I’m leaving Google Reader.
- The “Find” feature of Safari is better than Firefox. The highlighted text is easier to locate.
Cons:
- Safari for Windows is still in beta, so it’s buggish.
- You can only resize the window with the bottom-right corner of the window.
- I think this one is only a bug, whenever you minimize a maximized window and you want to restore it, it wouldn’t go back to the maximized state, but to the restored down one.
- There is no button on the toolbar that’ll open a new tab. The “New Tab” is buried under the “File” menu, so it would take you two clicks to open a new tab, alternatively, you can use Ctrl+T (the same shortcut for opening a new tab with the other browsers that support tabbed browsing). Moreover, the “+” button on the toolbar is misleading especially if you use have used Firefox for a while, because it only creates a new bookmark. Firefox, on the other hand, would create a new tab when you click the “+” button.
- Other features in Firefox are also available (copied?) in Safari
- If Firefox loves memory hogging, Safari loves it even more. It uses most of my memory. But since I’ve got 1GB of RAM2, it’s not really a big problem.
- Only basic plugins (e.g:Java, Flash) are available.
Bottom Line
I’m sticking wtih Firefox, it is still the best browser in my opinion no matter what Mac says (that Safari is 1.6 times faster than Firefox in rendering HTML and executing JavaScript). With Firefox, you can do more things aside from visiting websites. But I’m not removing Safari from Snidget. I’m going to use it the layouts that I create are compatible with it and watching Quicktime movies. You can download Safari 3 Public Beta at the Apple website (that just got a new makeover).
Opera isn’t installed on Snidget yet, I might try it the next time I got a free time.
So I end this post with screen shots on how my site looks like on IE7, Safari and Firefox:
Internet Explorer 7.0
Safari
Mozilla Firefox
PS: I just want to say thanks to digg, without it, I wouldn’t see these kind of stuffs, or if I would even without digg, at a later time. Visit it and subscribe to make your vote count! Digg on!
Hey! Why am I blogging about an Apple product when my notebook is running in Windows Vista? Haha!
