06.12.07
Safari for Windows
So, Apple has released Safari for Windows into public beta. It’s an interesting endeavour by Apple. I am really wondering about their business reasons behind it. Do they want more market share for Safari? Are they planning on releasing some Safari-specific functionality on their websites? Do they think Safari is cool and slick enough to convince Windows users to try a Mac?
After using safari for a little while I really didn’t see anything that impressed me and would make me switch from IE7 or Firefox. Even though I know it’s a public beta, there are few things missing which really made me raise my eyebrows. There are almost no window borders. On an XP machine this can make the window get lost amongst the other applications. You can only resize the window from the bottom right, but even then the cursor doesn’t change to a resize indicator until you actually press down the mouse button. They say it’s faster than IE7 or Firefox but honestly the way IE and Firefox render pages seems to be “smoother” and less “choppy” than Safari…and Safari didn’t seem any faster. You can only download data so fast, correct? Also on my HP laptop I press both mouse buttons down at the same time to auto-scroll; this doesn’t work in Safari. And there are no tooltips! Bad bad bad! Releasing a brand new product (to windows users, at least), and you can’t even hover over buttons to find out what they do. I am sure Apple knows how important tooltips are for discoverability and exploration, and I am really intrigued that such an important feature was missed. I guess they figured since they only have 2 or 3 “ambiguous” buttons, it wasn’t worth the effort?
Anyway, otherwise it feels quick and smooth. I wouldn’t switch though. It will be interesting to see what happens with Safari for Windows, to say the least.