Dirty secret: I love Safari on Windows

After bashing Safari for Windows when it first came out, I have to confess something: lately I've begun to rely on Apple's browser. Not for everything, mind you. But the more I use it, the more I like it.

The biggest reason: It's fast. It's faster to start up than Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Flock. And it's fast to load pages. Blindingly fast. Fast enough to make the Web feel more inviting.

I also like how it displays text. Sure it's using a non-standard font smoothing technology, but I think it looks great.

I don't like that my favorite plug-ins, Roboform and PicLens, don't work in Windows Safari. And I really don't like that there are security exploits emerging for Safari and that there's no open-source community to address them.

But when I need a Web page loaded up fast, Safari is often the browser I turn to.

Fast. Pretty. Different.

[signal7svr]

I've been using firefox for years, and recently started using safari for windows. I use it mostly for two things GMail (I do really miss the Better gMail extensions) and GReader. It loads faster, and renders the pages much more nicely than firefox. Just need to introduce more page and plugin compatibility. There's a lot of pages that safari breaks

hi rafe -- have you tried firefox 3 beta 4 on windows yet? we see speed to be about the same as safari, with much better stability & memory usage, plus extensions and web compatibility, of course.

john
(lilly -at- mozilla -dot- com)

[Zacm05]

That is not true that Firefox is about the same. Apple just released Safari 3.1, which is even faster than it used to be, so you cannot compare Firefox's speed to Safari. Safari blows everyone away when it comes to speed, especially on a Mac.

[eabu]

Firefox 3 beta 4 crashed so much, I uninstalled to oblivion.

[LEOPiC]

Well John

As a Web Dev, the reason that Rafe mentioned the anti-aliasing technology that Safari uses it's simply breath taking, makes everything look better.

[LEOPiC]

sorry that did not make any sense, what I mean is that it makes everything look so pretty that it's definitely a factor, however don't worry, we won't be switching firefox any time soon

[keith.r.benedict]

I think it makes everything look blury. I really don't like the fact that the address bar is not a drop down list box. That is a convenience feature that I can't live without.

[bubazoo]

I've never been a RoboForm fan at all, for two reasons. #1. you have to register a new account for every site you want to use roboform on. So if your a first time user of RoboForm, you have to register a new account on all your favorite message boards just to use RoboForm. #2 roboform is really bloat for what you really want to do, and that is, fill in userid and password prompts for you. There are a dozen other programs that do that better. I prefer keepass myself, or password agent, both do pretty much the same thing.

As for Safari, I agree most pages break using Safari, most people I know are still using Internet Explorer, and have no reason to switch browsers, except keeping safe from spyware. I think all these different companies coming out with browsers are just confusing the user population.

[rafe]

@John Lilly I just downloaded Firefox 3 beta 4 portable edition and will try it out. Thanks.

http://www.download.com/Firefox-3-Portable-beta/3000-2356_4-10780158.html

[edgedesign]

Safari is fast and has great support for web standards. Developers may want to enable the DEBUG menu:

http://developer.apple.com/internet/safari/faq.html#anchor14

It helps with more than just JavaScript (title in which the directions are listed).

[edgedesign]

It's now titled DEVELOP in the menu and can easily be enabled via Preferences.

http://www.simplebits.com/notebook/2008/03/18/safari.html

Hmm, looks like I'm the only one left on IE7. I was a bit surprise about how you like that text display in Safari, somehow that just looks weird to me, but maybe it's a matter of habit. I do use FF for some Javascript intensive sites like Weewar, so I have to agree that IE is def. behind.

[royster_live]

Agree with Safari being awesome. With 3.1, Safari supports HTML 5 media support, CSS animations and web fonts, offline storage. No other browser has these right now - including the so-called next generation browsers - Firefox 3 beta and IE8 beta. Safari is at least one generation ahead of the competition.

Royster
http://softprizm.com

[RicD]

Some say Safari breaks web pages; I truly don't know if it does or doesn't. So my question: are the pages that break using W3C standards while Safari isn't or, is Safari using W3C standards while the broken web pages aren't.

Pulling from my memory IE doesn't comply with W3C the same as many web sites. So when a browser does use W3C standards it may break pages that aren't coded using W3C. Sorry I don't know that answer, also I'm not taking sides, I use Safari 90% of the time Firefox 10%, I enjoy both.

[fsamuel]

I don't know if Safari breaks web pages but what I do know is that Safari can't make SSL connections to some sites that you are going to give out private information on. This is why, Mac users prefer Firefox or Opera. Even IE, for all the bashing of it, does not do this and all 3 don't have this new security problem that was announce yesterday. Apple refused to comment but the site gave a workaround which is only a temporary fix. This also affects IPhone. So, I would suggest to everyone to ignore these so-called experts on Cnet who constantly demonstrate their lack of knowledge about computers on both hardware and software end and, if you are using a Mact, then use Firefox or Opera or buy a PX that runs Windows so you can install security software that wiull do the job unlike Macs which you can only really install Norton which is a pretty bad security program.

[ifazk]

I'm using Opera 9.5 beta.... the pages load really fast....

[fsamuel]

Once again, the editor shows his ignorance of computers and he probablly got his degree off a matchbook cover
Facts:
Safari is known to have problems connecting to some secure sites. That is why Mac users prefer Firefox. Secondly, there has been found some flaws in Safari. as reported yesterday, that allow hackers to gain access by visiting some web sites and not just porn sites. You don't have to click on anything, you visit the sites and the code is installed silently on your computer and because Apple is so god-awful restrictive when it comes to installing 3rd party software, the only security software is not worth a pot to p*** in. Apple is refusing comment. This, by the way affects the Iphone too.It would be nice if these nobody's would fully disclose their education and how they generate money for themselves and Cnet.

[Zacm05]

Hey, guess what? I am a Mac user, and I prefer Safari. I have never had a problem with it, EVER. Stop assuming you know what everybody else likes. I only use Firefox for plugins, and thats only a small part of the time. Second, every internet browser has problems, including Firefox. No browser is perfect, and one would be ignorant to think so, so stop picking on a particular browser. Third, do not insult the editors. They know a hell of a lot more than you or I do when it comes to technology, regardless of background. It's their job to know so much and study these things Plus, it's just his opinion, nobody every said Safari being the best is fact. So relax already. It's people like you that ruin these comment pages for the rest of us. And stop taking a personal vendetta against Apple, they are just another technology company trying to make people happy, and they won't always succeed in doing so, but they will try their best to please customers.

[GradientMac]

I'm a Mac user. And I hate Firefox with a passion. Mac users do not prefer Firefox, you're pulling that out of your ass. There have been flaws in Safari, oh, wait, ever used IE? Oh... wait.. ever used any other browser in existence?

You're talking out your ass, and I have a bunch of plugins on Safari for Mac. Are you sure there's no plugin support on Safari Windows?

[mboltonrules]

Why is it ignorance? I use Safari mostly for a Mac. I also have used Firefox as well. I just prefer Safari for many of the same reasons the author suggests. Chill out. It's not the end of the world that some people haven't seen light like you have apparently.

And yes, I know Firefox has a new beta out. I just prefer not to use beta software ever.

[b_baggins]

A couple of points. One, Safari doesn't use a non-standard font rendering, it uses a non-Windows font rendering. There is a difference. Microsoft's font rendering is not true wysiwyg. It snaps to individual pixels on the display. Apple's rendering preserves the true shape of the font. Microsoft's philosophy was that fonts should be as sharp and crisp as possible at the sacrifice of preserving the actual letter forms. Apple, with its heavy background in print and design, unsurprisingly chose to preserve letterforms and spacing at the sacrifice of crispness and clarity. As displays have increased in resolution, the crispness and clarity issues have pretty much disappeared, which is why Apple rendering looks so amazing and Windows fonts still look blocky and squashed (unless you specifically use on the Microsoft fonts, which have been specifically designed to fit a pixel grid).

Secondly, Safari uses the webkit engine which is open source. In fact, it's the rendering engine used by KDE. When Safari 1.0 came out, there was a big stink because apple chose Konqueror over Gecko for its rendering engine.

[keegan95]

safari is a very good browser on windows, i especially like the text smoothing it uses, but it still doesn't come close to firefox 2. maybe it will add more features with the next release (add-ons?)

[agcorea]

when i try to open my yahoo account using safari, a message appears saying "Hmm...your browser is not officially supported."
Probably there are others pages that it still not support....

[eabu]

It is not supported by Yahoo, but Yahoo allows you to use Safari, just click on the link that says, ignore Yahoo. Yahoo Mail is much faster than on Firefox using Safari 3.1.

[FijiSkillz]

The reason Safari is so fast is because it opens 10 TCP connections per site instead of the standard 2 tcp connection for Firefox and IE. You can make changes to Firefox (with something like FasterFox) or IE with a registry change. Each HTTP connection is serial so you can only download 2 objects at a time per website (hostname) with the other browsers as opposed to 10 objects at a time for Safari. However a crappy EDGE connection for iPhone is most likely hindered by this behavior because there will be bandwidth contention across the connections.

[lantierl]

Safari on Windows? Fast, maybe. But, it doesn't work well with lots of other apps or pages. For example, when loading Ask.com in Safari, I found it displayed out of proportion and with items/elements out of alignment.

[eabu]

Safari 3.1 fixed that.

[sephirothis666]

I would also like safari, if it would not install anything else besides safari, for example: bonjour.

[Xyzzy613]

Try webkit.org where they can make Safari even faster.

[eabu]

Safari Wishlist:

I wish there was an option for all links to open up in a new tab. If a web page link opens up in a new window, doesnt that defeat the purpose of tab browsing? And no, I do not wish to have to lift my other hand to Command+Click, buy a new/reprogram a mouse, or pay for a plugin.

[pabo]

I am actually a typical Mac user. Don't try to sell me even a piece of a windows pc. I am also a FF addicted (switching mosaic to netscape to mozilla and then FF). I never really wanted to use Safari on my Mac. Did not really liked it. But I must admit that it starts to be a quite competitive browser especially since 10.5 has been released. Since that time, I have switched to Safari both on my Mac and on my work PC (they still didn't want to buy me a Mac .... :-@ ). Where I never believed that IE was ever a worthwhile alternative for anything, I have now dropped FF in favor of Safari. I like a lot of things and especially the handling of RSS feeds. And there is a way of opening different bookmarks in one shot .... just click the appropriate button in the bookmark list. There is also a way for recovering from the last session (perhaps a crash :-) ). And all of those work quite well. Compatibility has improved a lot. The only thing I really miss is a way of keeping my browsers in Sync, like the Google plugin or the Weave plugin for FF allow.

PS: I hate these security issues that popped up for Safari. That probably proves what Windows users said earlier .... you will have security problems as soon as your apps will get used. Now we have a glimpse of that.