Safari on Windows

Its Troy all over again. It started with iTunes and now there is a new horse on the block claiming to faster and better than its bigger rivals. Safari, the new Trojan horse is available for Windows. The popularity of iPod grew several folds when Apple released iTunes for PC. It raised Apple’s awareness in PC users. Steve Jobs at the recent WWDC claimed that Safari is twice as fast as IE 7 and 42% faster than Firefox 2.0. Also, he announced that 3rd party developers will be able to develop apps for iPhone via Web apps. Its looks like a move to open up the iPhone development environment to a much wider audience. Probably we might see some tools for Windows to develop iPhone apps.

This is my first experience with Safari. The download and installation is easy. The installation comes bundled with three separate Apple products: Quicktime, Bonjour and Apple update. The startup page took almost 10 seconds to load. Contrary to the claim, it doesn’t seem to any faster than Firefox or IE 7. Here is an interesting benchmark test for Safari. Its beta 3 and obviously there will be some improvements in the final release.

Apart from some of the common features like tabbed browsing and pop-up blockers found in the advanced browsers, Safari has few cool features that are noteworthy. You can drag a tab out of the main window turning it in to new browser window. The inbuilt RSS reader is neat. If you click “Installed Plug-ins” under Windows menu, it shows a comprehensive list of plug-ins, some you never though you had. Private browsing is another cool feature that comes with Safari.

On the downside, the home button is not available on the toolbar by default, but you can drag and drop the toolbuttons you want from the “Customise Toolbar” dialog box on to the toolbar. The OK-Cancel buttons are reversed in dialog box, which was bit annoying. Search box support only Google and Yahoo. Another feature that you would see is that when you try to key in a URL in the address bar, Safari suggests few sites in a drop-down list, probably sponsors. I am not sure how many users will like this form of advertising built-in to their browser.

Safari’s beta 3 for Windows looks promising on the whole. I am interested to hear what Microsoft has to say about it. Personally I feel Firefox is the real deal.

Technorati: Apple, Safari