Web Browsers: Part 4: Apple Safari 4
Generally Windows ports of Apple products take up a lot of system resources, are slow, crash often, and do not even work right. Without even using the Apple versions of these products, this much can be discerned.
From what I have noticed Safari is exactly what it advertises to be. A web browser, with an RSS reader. This is both good and bad. On the one hand this means that the developers can focus on making that one thing work very very well. On the down side, this means that you don’t have a very nice all-in-one program for handling practically anything the web could throw at you.
The new safari has some really nice features, and has very good integration with Windows 7, which is surprising considering that when Windows Vista came out Apple refused to support it for as long as they could.
The Look
I have never been a particular fan of Safari. I tried Safari 3 for Windows a few years ago and hated the way it looked. While not a major improvement, a few minor tweaks altered the look enough that it is now very visually appealing. The grayish-silver style Safari uses is very easy on the eyes, it does not strain them like Black on White does. Everything is right where you expect it to the preferences are very easy to find.
I particularly enjoyed the download manager that Safari has. Alternating colors of off-white and sky-blue separate each individual download from one another. The status bar used is very visually appealing. It is solid blue with white “pulses” streaming down it at regular intervals. It looks pretty.
The “Top Sites,” what is shown when you open a new tab, also looks very good. It is similar to Opera’s Quick Dial, and Google Chrome’s Favourite Sites, and many addons for FireFox including quick dial, and fast dial. It discovers what your most frequently visited sites are and places them on a large grid of the sites that you visit the most. After first instillation there are many popular sites as placeholders. You can edit this at any time, removing sites, pinning the ones you want to keep on the page, and adding sites that you want displayed.
Speed and Resource Usage
Safari is much faster than it used to be on Windows. Loading web pages almost immediately (assuming you have a fast connection). It no longer balks at flash, or javascript, nor really any of the things that it used to have trouble with. The problem however, is that it is currently using 184MiB of RAM, and 2-7% of my CPU. While they seem to have fixed the speed problem, it seems to be using more memory than ever. (Comparatively FireFox is only using 80MiB of RAM, but nearly 15% of my CPU).
Security
I never really tried to access in shady sites in Safari. I am not confident in it’s security. Unfortunately there do not seem to be in customizeable Javascript controls, decent adblock, or any other serious security measures. I’m sure the developers have coded in security measures of some sort (though they don’t really need to for it’s intended operating system), but I am not confident in that fact.
Other
Safari is much more open in it’s interpretation of Code than Opera is. This means that your website does not have to strictly conform to the .html standards for Safari to properly display it. As far as I could tell, Safari nearly fully supports CSS and Javascript, and pretty much everything else the web can throw at it.
While not only interpreting html in it’s strict format is nice for the end user, it promotes laziness in web-developers, as does FireFox, which is a little annoying, but at least it displays nearly everything well.
Up Next: Mozilla Firefox (with and without addons)