Browser Review: Safari 3 for Windows

This is the 5th day I've used Safari 3 on my Windows XP machine. To cut to the chase here's my review:

Things I like

1. Sleek gunmetal grey interface

2. Fast. Media-rich pages load noticeably faster than with Firefox and IE. No kidding.

3. The standard fonts have better contrast than FF and IE and are easier to read, especially if you're into text-heavy stuff like blogs.

4. The URL window at the top doubles up as a download progress indicator (window fills up with a blue color as the page completes its download).

5. A dedicated button bookmarks the page you're viewing with a single click.


Things that annoy me

1. No skins other than standard grey.

2. Primitive tab control. No option to auto-open links in a new tab in the same window without right-clicking.

3. The RSS bookmarking sucks. Instead of showing you a list of topics on a site when you mouse over the bookmark, you just get a number in parenthesis against the site name. Example, a (2) means 2 new topics on the site since your last visit. To see more you have to click the bookmark and import the entire RSS content into the browser which can take a while. Not very smart when all you wanna do is quickly scan thru the topics list.

4. Haven't found any status bar that displays the URL of a link that you mouse over. Basically you can't decide beforehand if a site's worth a visit until you actually visit it. Duh...

5. No sign of any plug-in or add-on features meaning you've to live with whatever (in)capabilities that come with the browser.

6. And most annoying of all, you can't turn off the URL autocomplete feature which apparently compiles its URLs directly from your history and imported bookmarks. Its very distracting. The only choice left is to go into private browsing mode (no history) and delete all my bookmarks. Blegh.

Ok maybe I am biased in favor of Firefox with its plethora of free skins and add-ons that give the browser so much power so it doesn't really make for an apple-to-apple comparison (no pun intended) but seriously, if you can get past the inconvenience of the slightly lower speed, FF is waaayy ahead of Safari in functional richness.

I don't really buy the argument that Safari is new therefore deficient. They've had plenty of time to catch up in versions 1 and 2 which didn't happen. If the folks at Apple know that 90% of things done on the internet are done through the browser and more and more people are buying PCs just to get online, this all-important window to the cyberworld won't be this half-baked. I mean other players out there are killing each other to be top dog in the browsers war.

Needless to say I continue to pledge my allegiance to Firefox.