This evening I downloaded Safari from Apple to see what it is like. it is not that I am unhappy with Firefox, but there is a sort of novelty value to having Safari running under Windows and a certain amount of hype about it, so I thought I would see if any of it was justified.

The Safari browser is being ‘sold’ on 12 features, as follows:

1. Blazing performance
   I can’t argue with that. It really does go like shit off a shovel, serving up web pages even faster than Firefox.
2. Elegant user interface
   Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I am not a fan of the Apple look and feel. I am particularly unimpressed by the fact you can only resize a window at the bottom-right corner.
3. Easy bookmarks
   I never found bookmarks hard on Explorer or Firefox. The boast is that you can view your bookmarks so that it looks like iTunes. This may be a benefit if you do not detest iTunes.
4. Pop-up blocking
   Just like every other browser
5. Inline find
   A bit misleading. The website doesn’t tell you that you have to go searching the menus to enable the “integrated Find banner”. It works, but I find the Firefox equivalent easier.
6. Tabbed browsing
   Wow. Even Explorer has that now. It might as well boast about showing pictures and hyperlinks.
7. Snapback
   Sounds good in theory. Whenever I tried it I was just snapped back to my home page which I could have done with the Home button.
8. Forms AutoFill
   Doesn’t Firefox do this as well?
9. Built in RSS
   I don’t think I will use this but it works quite well.
10. Resizable text fields
    Again, it works but isn’t of great practical use for me.
11. Private browsing
    Might be a good idea if you share a computer and have something to hide. I am sure all the features can be turned on/off in other browsers but not in such an easy way.
12. Security
    I am no expert, but it all looks like pretty standard stuff and not significantly different to Firefox.

Out of all those, the speed one is the only benefit which is unequivocally better than the alternatives: the rest are of doubtful value or are purely subjective

The way text is rendered is different to Firefox/Explorer. On some sites it is more readable, on others it doesn’t look so good, but it does look different. The minimal silver skin takes some getting used to, unless you are already familiar with iTunes and you either love it or hate it.

What I found unforgivable was the limited resize options, and I was annoyed by the lack of a Home button by default. I did find out how to add the button, but I can’t work out why it was not already there – but that was before I found that the snapback does the same thing for me.

Being a beta, there is an extra button for reporting bugs. I was tempted to report that resizing doesn’t work except on the bottom-right corner…

I think I will keep this and may use it for some general browsing where speed matters, but otherwise I will stick with Firefox.