Windows Safari
http://live.pirillo.com/ – At the WWDC Apple announced that their browser, Safari, would be released for the Windows platform, and the beta is available right now.
What’s Chris’s take on the browser? For the most part: it’s definitely beta.
- There are some UI issues: it sticks out like a sore thumb, and not in a good way. The general interface doesn’t look like iTunes on Windows, but it’s seemingly faster.
- There is a lack of "power user" options. Safari is a very basic web browser without any real bells and whistles.
- It’s about as fast as Firefox and costs the same, too (it’s free).
- It’s pretty apparent that it’s meant for developers who want to develop widgets for the iPhone, rather than the average user.
Chris’s recommendation: if you want it, give it a shot, but he’s not going to recommend it as a browser any time soon.
What’s your take on Safari on Windows?
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16 Comments
Ed Estochin
June 14th, 2007
at 5:08am
I tried Safari and I already took it off my computer. It was very, very slow loading up. I had to download Itunes to preview anything on it. I took that off also…
Ed Estochin
June 14th, 2007
at 5:08am
I tried Safari and I already took it off my computer. It was very, very slow loading up. I had to download Itunes to preview anything on it. I took that off also…
Mark
June 14th, 2007
at 5:29am
I thought it was somewhat blah looking. I was extremely annoyed it did not import my bookmarks automatically like it said it would and i never could find an easy way to do it afterwards…even with the “bookmark” importer…it never would let me grab my “favorites” from windows XP.
Mark
June 14th, 2007
at 5:29am
I thought it was somewhat blah looking. I was extremely annoyed it did not import my bookmarks automatically like it said it would and i never could find an easy way to do it afterwards…even with the “bookmark” importer…it never would let me grab my “favorites” from windows XP.
Rob
June 14th, 2007
at 8:17am
I’ve tried it on three different Windows machines so far. Install was broken to varying degrees on all of them – text in menus is missing – toolbar buttons don’t work – address bar is blank with no way to enter urls – large pieces of web pages (including Apple’s) don’t display although all plug-ins seem to be installed. It seems more like an early Alpha release than a public beta. I’ll probably try again later but this seems to be a very poor public release. I was truly hopeful that Apple might actually produce something useful. BTW – the only way I’ve found to send bug reports is the little “bug” icon on the toolbar – which also did not work.
Media-Ted
June 14th, 2007
at 10:45am
I found that it wants to open only one way, small sized, and on my “primary” monitor, even though I always move it to my left screen. I have the same problem(s) with Juno, but do not expect as much from them as from Apple.
I chose NOT to install QT or iTunes, so expected some flak over videos. Weather Channel (Weather.com) played very nicely and seemed (seemed) to have clearer resolution – less distortion, but the very next day Safari prompted me to download QT, and when I did not, the video was no longer useful. Thought that a bit childish.
Although it has “movable” tabs, it cannot accept more than one tab for startup. The Bookmarks Bar does allow a folder into which I placed all my desired tabs and will open all upon the selection to “Open As Tabs” at the bottom of the choice list.
All in all, it would have been a great browser – - – two years ago, but IE-7 already has it beat. I had been having beaucoup problems with FireFox 2.0.0.7, so was looking for alternatives. Opera seemed very promising until the video collapsed and many weather sites (Accuweather, Weather.com) as well as the NASA broadcast page are flip-flops of design and scripting. FireFox has been much too sluggish in this new release for my taste; hope it cleans up its act and loosens up on the processor.
Media-Ted
June 14th, 2007
at 10:52am
Oops! Almost forgot; whenever I try to go “full screen” with it – no matter where it’s currently positioned – it disappears off the left side of my left screen and I must right-click on the taskbar tab and click on “Move” and hold the right-arrow key down until it appears about 1/3; then the cursor jumps to it and can drag it elsewhere!
Yes, it truly disappears! This is an Acer Aspire 3000 with the normal, onboard, dual screen setup in XP-Home, so there’s no 3rd party gimmickry involved. Not good.
Media-Ted
June 14th, 2007
at 10:52am
Oops! Almost forgot; whenever I try to go “full screen” with it – no matter where it’s currently positioned – it disappears off the left side of my left screen and I must right-click on the taskbar tab and click on “Move” and hold the right-arrow key down until it appears about 1/3; then the cursor jumps to it and can drag it elsewhere!
Yes, it truly disappears! This is an Acer Aspire 3000 with the normal, onboard, dual screen setup in XP-Home, so there’s no 3rd party gimmickry involved. Not good.
Henrique Vaamonde
June 14th, 2007
at 4:24pm
It’s hard to understand how a serious company ,as Apple is suppose to be, can even think in offer us that shameful product as Saffari is. I used it for ten minutes with a countless number of crashes…Thank you Steve.
Henrique Vaamonde
June 14th, 2007
at 4:24pm
It’s hard to understand how a serious company ,as Apple is suppose to be, can even think in offer us that shameful product as Saffari is. I used it for ten minutes with a countless number of crashes…Thank you Steve.
Zaphod
June 14th, 2007
at 4:29pm
It installed perfectly, imported all my bookmarks from both IE & FF without asking and has worked flawlessly.
I find it loads quickly and has a “clean” look to it. It goes to full screen without any problem.
I’m not a power user so I haven’t missed the things Chris has.
However there is one small niggly thing I miss – when you hover over a link in FF I can see the address the link is pointing to in a bar at the bottom of my screen/browser. Safari doesn’t seem to show me where links point to without opening them.
However, a big plus possible plus for Safari – do the nasty “hack” exploits for IE & FF work on it?
Zaphod
June 14th, 2007
at 4:29pm
It installed perfectly, imported all my bookmarks from both IE & FF without asking and has worked flawlessly.
I find it loads quickly and has a “clean” look to it. It goes to full screen without any problem.
I’m not a power user so I haven’t missed the things Chris has.
However there is one small niggly thing I miss – when you hover over a link in FF I can see the address the link is pointing to in a bar at the bottom of my screen/browser. Safari doesn’t seem to show me where links point to without opening them.
However, a big plus possible plus for Safari – do the nasty “hack” exploits for IE & FF work on it?
David
June 15th, 2007
at 5:35am
I tried Safari, and found it to be EXTREMELY slow – much, much slower than IE7 or Firefox. I’m running XP Pro SP2 with up-to-date patches and a 7mb DSL connection. I tried Safari with three or four sites, including its default home page, and then couldn’t take the wait anymore – it was like regressing to dial-up. I would have expected better from Apple.
jennifer
June 16th, 2007
at 8:52am
I decided to give Safari a chance, but it was a no go from the start. It acts like it wants to load but i get a “generated errors message please restart” with the same things happening. So maybe apple needs to work on it some more, I will always use Safari on my ibook, and when I upgrade my imac thats what I will use.
econroller
June 16th, 2007
at 7:52pm
It crashed so often on my XP machine I had to uninstall it within 15 minutes. I could not even report a bug without it crashing. Interesting that if you go to Apple’s web site and use the ‘contact us’ link, go to products, Safari isn’t listed. Oh well, I love my MacBook Pro, but will stick to Firefox on Windows.
Brook
July 28th, 2007
at 9:57pm
I us XP Pro SP2 all updates… my wife uses a MacBook OSX she has Safari and FF… I use IE6 (IE7 would not work properly with some of my encrypted pages), FF and am trying Safari… at first it seemed to run as nice as on the MacBook, but my problem is I can get no audio from some sites that have embeded mp3 audio files. I can not view DVX movies (they won’t load), flash does work… before I dump it I’d like to see if I can get the mp3 to play… sent numerous ‘bug’ reports with sites etc that work fine in FF and IE… thanks for listening