Safari for Windows: Hit or Miss?

About 7 months earlier, Apple launched its Safari browser for Windows. DID YOU HEAR IT? Well certainly some stats dont show so. Referring to the Google Analytics report (OS / Browser) and out the last 6 million visitors, only 8500 (0.15%) were using Safari on Windows. And guess what???? Apple says its the fastest browser for windows.
It seems Apple wants to prove that Safari 3 is the "world's best browser," but with alternatives like Camino and Omniweb, many will argue that Safari isn't even the best browser for Mac OS X, let alone the best browser for Windows.
Listing the flaws in Safari for Windows, the most glaring flaw of Safari 3 on Windows is its utter lack of stability. The problem faced during testing really exceed tolerable limits for beta software.Safari hangs and freezes frequently, and once it completely locked up my system, necessitating a hard reset. Unlike Firefox, Safari 3 can't automatically restore the previous browsing session after a crash.
Next to go, most mainstream web browsers allow users to rotate through tabs by hitting Ctrl + Tab. Safari is the exception this rule and uses Ctrl + Shift + [ and Ctrl + Shift + ] instead of Ctrl + Tab and Ctrl + Shift + Tab. Unfortunately, this behavior is not configurable. Even more frustrating than that, Safari's inline search feature doesn't let you activate links with the Enter key. next and most important: Security. Although the Safari 3 web page claims that Safari was designed to be "secure from day one," a number of security vulnerabilities have already been found. So guys better look out while using safari.

Now the good points: When using Safari 3 on Windows, one can clearly see that much effort went into making the Windows Safari experience as similar as possible to the Mac OS X Safari experience. So all you people who want to experience Mac OS X go for it. Adding to good points, Safari 3 for Windows uses the Mac OS X font anti-aliasing mechanism rather than ClearType, which is native to Windows. Aside from the slight rendering performance advantage, Safari 3 also includes a few nice features. For instance, Safari allows users to resize text boxes that are embedded in web pages. I'm also moderately impressed with Safari 3's inline find feature despite the fact that it can't be used to activate links. Rather than just highlighting words that match the page search query, Safari will dim the rest of the page to make matches stand out more clearly. Safari will also put orange highlighting around the active match and display a little animation when the user hits Ctrl+ G to rotate to the next match. The animation draws the user's attention to the new active match and makes it easier to see.


So here goes my analysis of Apple Safari for Windows. It is available to download for free. You can click here to download it.