Some first thoughts on Safari for Windows

Wednesday, June 13, 2007 12:56 am By BigLig

Well, Vista did me in (refused to accept any of our corporate license keys and slowly timed itself out) and Feist Fawn wouldn't boot (fixable no doubt but I only had a day to get a workable machine) so I'm back on boring XP, but! Thanks to Steve Jobs I have something new to break my machine with, Safari for Windows.

Cons:
  • Inflexible compared to FF or even IE; for example, you can only use Google or Yahoo from the search button, no control over the tabbed browsing, all sorts of things oly work in the way they specify.
  • Doing their own font smoothing makes it look wierd sometimes.
  • Doesn't support a favicon-only lnks toolbar. Never heard of that? In Firefox, put some links on the bookmarks toolbar. See how some of them have favicons, little icons of that website's logo? Now rename all those to "", i.e. to not have a name. You just made a neat little toolbar with buttons corresponding to your favorite sites. There's even an extension to let you use a custom Favicon. This saves so much screen real estate. 
Pros:
  • Seems to have every media plug-in I use built right in.
  • Looks nice (excluding the font smoothing)
  • Encouraged me to trim my Favicon-only links toolbar. ;-)
  • As intelligence increasingly moves up to the server (blah blah Web 2.0 blah blah) having hundreds of browser plug-ins becomes less important.
  • RSS feed reader looks very good: I'll have to figure out a way to import from Bloglines to test it properly.

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