analog feelings, digital world

Category: tools — Maciek Talaska @ 8:08 pm

A few days ago I have found information that Safari (Web browser for MacOS) is available for free for Windows system. I have heard a lot of good things about this browser from it’s user, so I gave it a try. The first thing is that Safari (the one that is available for PC) is still in beta, so don’t be suprprised if something works not as you would expect. After installing – first run of the browser – yup, it mimics the MacOS’s Aqua interface. Quite nice ;) Below I wrote the pos and the cons of the PC version of Safari after using it for a few days.

Pros:

very nice rendering (font looks a bit better – and it is not subjective opinion).

renders pages really fast (not only on my development machine, but also on the ‘historical’ pc used by my parents) . Another thing that is worth to mention is that Safari is not only fast at rendering pages, but it also seem to use not as much of cpu power when it has many tabs open (comapred to Firefox). Of course, you may enojoy it’s speed as long as it does not crash ;)
some of the users may find it’s user interface very interesting
fancy glare effect (focus) – when a control that is focusable and it content can be changed by user (all those text fields, checkboxes…) gets focus, it also gets some kind of glare. It is nice to know where the focus is, right?
does not seem to be a bloat-ware. does not consume a lot of memory. It seems to have .net – alike memory management mechanism built in. When you minimize Safari it just frees memory, so it takes only about a few MB of RAM.
most sites are rendered correctly.
works perfectly with Silverlight! (I have checked it woth Silverlight version of Microsoft Download Center)
it is very convenient for the user that they do not want people to change their habbits, and the shortcuts for the most frequently used functions are ’standard (ctr+t for new tab, F5 for refresh content… – it is nice that learned the Opera’s lesson ;)
Safari has ver cool ’search ‘ feature. It is somewhat similar to the one in Firefox. Safari highlits all wordswhich contain the specified phrase, and phrase in ‘active’ word is highlited in yellow. It is also possible to move backward and forward through all the words containing search-phrase using buttons. It would be even better if there would be possibility to move between findings using some shortcuts (alt+n for next – just like in Firefox woudl be great ;)

Cons:

unstable (crashes very often). It helps a lot if you just uncheck the ‘Enable plugins’ options in Security -> Web Content.
often gives message that is unable to display a page… – if you get the ‘page could not be loaded’ message – try to hit F5 – sometimes Safari needs this key to be pressed several times ;) )
there’s no option to double-click on the tab area to create new tab (ctrl+t or right-click and ‘new tab’)
plugins for mac version of Safari does not seem to work (you just can’t use Apple’s dmg executable, can you?) And there are very few plugins for PC version of Safari (if any… I haven’t found a one myself)
very few options – I just wasn’t able to configure some of the settings I would like to
sometimes it consumes a lot of cpu (I have encountered this issue while watching some movies on youtube). This problem is connected somehow with plugins. I think there are some plugins that works, but sometimes they cause Safari to hang-up or even crash. The browser itself (without plugins) is quite reliable.
there are only two options for download location: desktop or any other folder. why can’t I choose folder apropriate for what I am downloading right before clicking ‘download’?
kind of a strange bookmark & rss management… well, not really a management, but I am still confused about what should I do (where to click) if I want to manage bookmarks or rsses. I always forget, that I should click on the book icon on the bookmarks toolbar (there is another way to enter bookmark management window… but I have forget it ;) I wonder, why did they decided not to put “Manage your bookmarks” option in “Bookmarks” menu? And the bookmark management is not very friendly. You got it open – ok. Now lets assume that you would like to create a new bookmark folder. Hm… right click is not working… so how should I…? Ah! There are some small plus-icons buttons _at the very bottom_… I don’t think it really the best idea.
I still do not know why I can’t get New York Times pages to show me their dictionary after double clicking on a specified word. In IE/Opera/Mozilla it works without problems. I have enabled all the scripts, JavaScript, Java. I have also let the browser to show pop-up windows… no effect.
one thing I really miss in Safari is session saver. (I know that Mozilla also does not have it on board right after installation but there is a plugin ;) and Opera, and even IE – both have this feature built in).
web address autocompletion: Safari has this feature. But it works… strange. It takes a while to realize that when there is a list of addresses that are similar to what you have typed shown to you – most of the people are used to hit enter (to get to the address that is first in list of those suggested by browser), or click on the one that they want to choose. In Safari you also may use Enter. But if you’re a fan of a mouse – you have to double click the address you would like to go. Small inconvenience.
there is no fullscreen optionn (F11 in Firefox/IE). I really missed it while using Safari – especially when working on my laptop (it’s display is not as big as I would like it to be).
Safari has problems managing many tabs. Lets assume that you’ve opened so many tabs, that they don’t fit in tabs bar. You can – of course – select a tab which title is not visible on tabs bar, but there is no way to close it (or I just haven’t found one – after a while I have found one solution: you can ‘Move Tab to New Window’ (’Window’ menu) and then close the window. Hm… a bit too tricky, don’t you think?
if you use the ‘Move Tab to Other Window’ and in the new window you add some folders to the bookmarks… be prepared for Safari to crash if you would like to add a page to bookmarks.
browser doesn’t save what you have typed in google search – and I find this thing to be extremely useful
sometimes it looses focus – especially when you’re working mostly with keyboard (you go forward, backward, and want to scroll the page using keys? sometimes you just have to click on the site content to be able to do so). Sometimes when editing some texts on pages you cannot go to the line above / below
using keys – just as if there would be no lines above / below.

I have also made some small memory-usage test. I typed in the web browsers address bars the address of the site I have presented screenshot a bit earlier. So, the results are:

IE7: 39 348K, 7 024K (after minimize-restore)

Safari: 46 328KK, 14 924 (after minimize-restore)

Opera: 20 948K, 6 000K – 7 000K (after minimize-restore)

FireFox: 32 228K, the same after minimize-restore (it is really strange, don’t you think?)

So, is Safari worth a try? Definetly yes. Of course some things works a bit different than in other browsers, but after some time, when you get used to them – you may even think that things should be done Apple way ;) There are some things Safari misses and the most important is: plugins. It would be perfect if PC version could use all those plugins that have been made for Mac version (but I don’t think it is possible). Bare Safari is definitely not enough for many people. One thing I really like Safari for: it has the nicest font rendering engine! Reading sites in Safari is just a pure pleasure! And I think I will keep Safari installed on my PC just for its speed and font rendering.

(Yup, this note was created using Safari ;)

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