Thursday 28 June 2007

Safari On Windows... It seems a popular topic of conversation

Yeah ok, its been blogged to death, but I still want to put in my 2 cents!

And please remember, I am coming from a web developer/designer point of view, so my opinion is slightly biased.

Right, now that Safari 3 for windows has been out for a few weeks now, and has seen several patches, I read a few posts here and there about people comparing its speed, its type rendering, and how long it took for them to crash it.

One by one I guess:

Speed
So Mr Jobs is claiming Safari to be significantly faster than all of the other popular browsers (ok, so we're talking about Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Opera here)
So far I have noticed no obvious speed improvements, then again I don't use Safari as my main browser on a day-to-day basis

Type rendering
This is one of those things where most people are very confused about wether or not they like the "fuzzy fonts" in Safari.
I guess you've already guessed where I stand. Thats right - fuzzy fonts rock. Why you ask ? because it makes the fonts look like they were meant to look, not the way the OS wants them to look for the sake of fitting them inside of pixel boundaries. (Not sure what the hell I'm talking about? Joel Spolski from Fogbugz blogged about it on JoelOnSoftware a short while ago and did quite a good job of explaining it in this post)
Now after you have been overindulged with information...

Crashing Safari
The browser is in BETA people... this means it's not even release quality software - its still in (final) testing.
If you have something to say still about Safari crashing... please read the above line again... yes.. BETA means Use-Me-On-A-Production-System-And-Suffer-You-Fool.
Ok, so I installed it on my dev machine at work, and upgraded my Safari 2.0 on my macbook to Safari 3 and I haven't had crashes yet. But if/when it does crash, you won't hear about it, because I will simply accept it's still beta software that needs a few bug fixes here and there.

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