One can go absolutely crazy with the number of choices there are for web browsers these days. Much of the world switched from IE to FireFox and Opera, now Google Chrome is a viable option, and finally Apple's OS:X default browser Safari is in version 4 beta.
Safari has been an option for Windows users for some time, I myself ran it for about a week a year ago, and was very unimpressed. This review will be another look at Safari for me and hopefully show a basic concept comparing it to Google's Chrome and Mozilla FireFox. This review isn't going to go in depth on RSS feeds or rendering of all pages, it will just be a basic comparison for the average user who may be stuck on their "favorite" browser, in my case, Chrome.
To start off, I will give bit of information on what I like in a browser. The browser needs to provide accurate rendering of web pages, smooth to operate and view pages, and provide quick use of history, bookmarks and tabs. I also like a clean, small, practical interface (I was a huge fan of F11 back in the IE days). Also as a final note, I switched from FireFox to Chrome for those very reasons, Chrome was much more responsive, had a cleaner interface, and to me provided a more practical use of tabs.
Now to the good stuff. I started off downloading the beta of Safari 4, noting that it was a 25MB download. Once downloaded, the installer asked the usual stuff, but surprisingly didn't include the iTunes/Quick time push (must be due to being a beta). Install time was less than 5 mins. Once installed, the first run showed me the first thing I really didn't like, it was slow. Mind you my workstation is a little dated: Intel P4 3.0GHZ 1GB of RAM and a 250GB Hard Drive. But it shouldn't have taken almost 40secs to load. Once loaded I was welcomed by a screen that showed me pages on a layout that would look native on a Mac or iPhone, not Windows. Even though this was out of place in my opinion, it matched the functionality of Chrome's new tab page. The next thing I noticed was that switching between Safari and other open programs then back, would make Safari bog trying to render the page again. After browsing more pages, same results, slower performance than Chrome or FireFox, but it looked prettier....
The only good thing I can say for Safari at this point is that it seems to be a prettier version of Chrome, which tells me a lot of ideas were taken from Chrome in this release of Safari. So if you have a beefy system or a Mac, or like the look of Apple programs running in Windows, go with Safari. But if you want a browser that is going to function well, give you accurate rendering of pages with a little less eye candy and less bloat, stick with Chrome or FireFox.
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