Much ado was made when His Job’ness announced that the Apple browser Safari was available immediately for us poor deprived Windows users. Being the glutton I am for playing with software I headed out and got my own copy which I wrote about here. Almost immediately out came the reports about security holes and much written about the the text rending within Safari.

Along with that smarter folks than me have weighed in on the reasoning of Apple releasing a windows version of Safari and while it can make for an interesting afternoon of reading and speculation I am more interested in how the browser works. So I have spent the last while on and off using Safari as my main browser.

Now I like IE7, I don’t like Firefox and even though I have found some strange circumstances in which IE7 gets really funky to the point I have to close it down and check in Task Manager to make sure it is really gone (BTW anyone know WTH ieuser.exe is?) I’m still open to trying something new to see if it does the job better.

In general I like Safari; especially since the version update to 3.0.2 which seems to have fixed the blurry font problem that was reported with the initial 3.0 release. It has a smooth running feel to it and in my limited testing it appears to use the same or less memory than IE 7 and definitely less than Firefox (yes I have it installed .. still don’t like it).

But not all is rosy in Safari-land as there are still a few things that while not show stoppers are definitely irritations. First off - the gradient gray color of the program itself. I’m sorry but talk about a bland looking UI - Safari has to take the cake on this one. Even iTunes and its metallic look is better than this.

While the importing of IE Favorites is flawless (why is it that Favorites or Bookmarks are standard import features but not cookies .. it is nothing but a pain having to remember log-ins each time you try a new browser) the one thing I would have liked an option to have the Bookmark Bar link open in new tabs with a single click.

The last minor irritation with Safari is it’s minimize and maximize from the Taskbar. While you can maximize an already minimized instance of Safari by clicking on its Taskbar button the same doesn’t hold for minimizing it. that has to be done from the minimize button on the program title bar.

As I said these are only minor irritations and while the UI color scheme is boring as hell I can live with it just as I can with the other things. Will it replace IE7 permanently as my main browser? Don’t know but I will be more inclined to fire it up during those times that IE pisses me off than I will Firefox.

UPDATE: just a quick note that I have found one thing about Safari that is indeed a show stopper. when I went to edit a post in WordPress using Sarafi it stripped the paragraph formatting for the post. That won’t do at all so back to IE for now and I’ll keep an eye on Safari for future updates to see if this gets fixed

Conversation Tags: Apple, Safari, Microsoft, Internet Explorer 7, IE7