Impressions Of Safari For Windows
As I said yesterday, I’ve recently been using Apple’s Safari browser for day to day web use. I tend to do this for a little while with any new browser, just to get a general idea of how they work and to identify any peculiar behaviour they have in rendering web pages. Cross browser compatibility is a hugely important part of web accessibility so having a reasonable feel for how different browsers behave is very useful.
Safari is the standard browser provided with the Mac OS X software and until this version has been Mac exclusive. It was apparently something of a surprise when Steve Jobs announced that the latest Beta 3 version would also be available on Windows. But given that it faces significant competition from the continually developed Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 I think it’s doubtful whether Safari is going to make any significant inroads into browser usage on PCs in the near future.
The biggest claim that Safari makes is that it provides faster loading of web pages and therefore a more efficient browsing experience. It claims to load pages on average 2 x as fast as Internet Explorer and 1.7 x as fast as Firefox. In practice I’ve noticed no massive difference in general browsing, though Safari does seem to be noticeably faster when loading images, and a little slower with sites that incorporate a reasonable amount of Javascript (this despite Apple’s claim that the browser is also faster executing Javascript). Browsing speed is certainly not a significant factor regardless of what Apple’s benchmark results might suggest.
It has the usual Apple style in appearance, and does simplify things in comparison to most browsers. But we’re talking about web browsers here, appearance is never going to be a significant factor and navigation using any current browser is going to be a relatively easy process in terms of user interface. I am a fan of its RSS feed button - any time you visit a site with an RSS feed a blue button appears which clicks straight through to Safari’s own RSS view. This provides search functionality and works as kind of a newsreader-lite application, and is a nice user-friendly incorporation of RSS into the browser. Safari doesn’t provide feed subscription as Firefox, though.
Safari’s biggest weakness, and one it shares with Internet Explorer, is that it just doesn’t have the same kind of flexibility and configuration options of Firefox. The open source nature of Mozilla’s browser allows for handy add-ons, such as the accessibility add-ons I discussed yesterday. This is where Firefox remains ahead of the game, but it is also where there’s a possibility of some promise for Safari, given that Apple has decided to make WebKit, the engine for Safari, open source. That means there is the possibility for more add-ons in future.
Even so, Safari still has a long way to go before it matches Firefox or even Internet Explorer 7. I’ve found it a bit unstable and suffered more than a few crashes (it particularly dislikes Blogger for some reason). The auto-complete of URLs seems often to completely delete a half-typed entry, and there is no F11 full screen hotkey which is pretty standard on browsers. Having used it for a week or so in testing I’ll be reverting to Firefox for my day to day use.
I will keep Safari installed of course. In terms of web design I’m hoping that looking at pages in Windows Safari will give a reasonable idea of how the pages will render if viewed on a Mac (where Safari is far more prevalent as the browser). It does seem to adhere to the gamma differences between Mac and PC, even in the Windows installation. These differences see RGB colours rendered brighter than in Firefox or Internet Explorer (see ‘Background Images…‘ article of last week on RGB rendering and gamma correction). Of course I keep a number of browsers installed on PC at any one time because as a web designer quickly being able to evaluate cross browser accessibility is vital. So Safari will join Opera, Internet Explorer 6 & 7, and Firefox as browsers I use to check web page design on. Beyond that, however, it won’t be receiving heavy use.
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