safari 3 on windows::06.13.2007+16:56
I recently downloaded and installed the public beta of Safari 3 for Windows. Below are my feelings about it. Please remember that a number of these are matters of taste, and as such, comments telling me that I am wrong about those points will be ignored/deleted/etc… Read on for the full post.
Images removed until further notice due to hosting provider change.
Things I Like
RSS View - The rss view is really nice, powerful, and clean. It’s better than Firefox’s basic RSS view. However, as a full-fledged RSS reader, it is really lacking (compare: Liferea).
Fast Renderer - The renderer seems faster (or is perhaps just more responsive) than Firefox’s Gecko, especially when viewing sites with moving elements.
RAM Usage - To open the same set of pages in both Safari and Firefox results in Safari using less memory than Firefox, regardless that Safari uses more memory at startup.
Things I Dislike
CPU Usage - Actively browsing webpages resulted in 50% - 80% CPU average. This is unacceptable as Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer aren’t anywhere near this bad.
It’s Ugly - I personally find the low-contrast, brushed metal look and feel to be ugly, and I find it exceedingly arrogant of Apple to force a certain visual style upon windows users (not that they care however — see: Quicktime, iTunes). Also, tabs are very visually non-distinct, as is the text on them, as shown in this screenshot:
Bug Button - The button to file a bug report on a webpage doesn’t make sense. It looks like a malformed ant (no head), which doesn’t make me think bug (I actually mistook it for a spider at first glance). It just makes me wonder what they’re trying to say. The button should say “Bug?” or something similar on it, rather than having a cryptic icon of a six-legged spider-ant.
Creepy Modal Dialog - When I clicked the bug icon, a dialog rolled out of the titlebar like some sort of translucent tongue. This was extremely unnerving for me, and entirely unexpected. Not to mention that the dialog involved happened to be modal.
Middle-Click Inconsistencies - middle clicking to open in a new tab should be possible in more places, like the rss button in the address bar or the bookmarks display. Or any of the links in the link bar.
Font Rendering - I find the font rendering to be immensely ugly and blurry, even on light smoothing. FreeType on Linux and ClearType on Windows both do a far better job with smoothing.
Doesn’t Act like a Windows App - I also find it arrogant of Apple to make an application that doesn’t behave anything like a Windows application. Granted, there are natively Windows applications that break conventions left and right, but I don’t expect dialogs to pop out of titlebars and I don’t expect the preferences dialog to resize everytime I select a different category (which I find to be extremely annoying). I do however, realize that they are doing this so that hopefully they can get the user to buy a Mac and use Mac OS X and then the user will be familiar already with the quirks of that OS. Regardless, this is really poor form.
Conclusion
I find that I really dislike Safari. It has potential because the design itself is pretty clean and nice, but it’s being ruined by the Mac OS X baggage that Apple has decided that it should carry. I guess, what I’m saying is that someone should use WebKit (or KHTML) to make a browser for Windows that isn’t bound to Apple’s way of doing things because the browser core isn’t the problem here. It’s the presentation of the core that makes it not worthwhile.