OK. So Apple’s released a Windows version of Safari (and I tried blogging from Safari, but it submitted a blank page, and copy and paste from Safari back to Firefox was rather buggy *not happy*), and I don’t quite like what I see. This is why I’m sticking to Firefox for at least the time being:
- Yet another look: It looks like a Mac application, feels like a Mac application and behaves like a Mac application. If I wanted to use a Mac, I’d use a Mac. (I know it’s similar to the deal with iTunes and QuickTime, but I hate both as well.)
- Font rendering is weird: It looks like they’ve copied over the font rendering from the Mac as well; compared with the Windows font rendering, the font smoothing looks uncomfortable and I’m not sure I like the character spacing. If this is what it’s like to use a Mac, this is even less reason for me to switch.
- Another new set of keyboard shortcuts: Firefox and IE keep their keyboard shortcuts relatively similar so it’s not much of a pain to switch between the two, but Safari… just realised that Ctrl+Backspace doesn’t work, and it doesn’t minimise when you go Winkey+M.
- Downloads: It downloads straight to the Desktop, or to another folder. I want to be prompted for each location.
- Plugins: It’s new so there are hardly any plugins yet.
Enough rambling for the time being, but no I’m not going to be using Safari as my everyday browser any time soon. I must agree it’s faster, but its memory footprint is far worse than Firefox (150MB in ten minutes?). I’ll keep it around, however, to test my website.
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That’s true - it’s to do with the fact that the Safari window is a little hacked together and doesn’t respect the minimise and maximise commands (even though it draws its own minimise and maximise buttons). Winkey+D just dumps the desktop on top and doesn’t bother with actually minimising your programs.
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The whole point of Safari for Windows is to bring the KHTML rendering engine to Windows so that developers can create webapps for the iPhone (and make existing websites compatible with Macs). I don’t really think they ever have plans to make it compete with the big players.
Also I think the font rendering is better on Macs. The upside of it being “blurrier” is that the rendering is essentially faithful to the letterforms of the typeface. With increasing pixel densities in screens and resolution independence, I think this will be less of a problem in future.
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Yeh, after follow-up reading after I wrote that post, I agree with both of your comments. Though for the font rendering, being faithful to the paper representation on paper isn’t necessarily a good thing; I still think ClearType on Windows is more readable on screen.
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