Safari Browser for Windows

Apple has released their Safari browser for Windows users, saying to:

Experience the web, Apple style, with Safari: the fastest, easiest-to-use web browser in the world. With its simple, elegant interface, Safari gets out of your way and lets you enjoy the web — up to 2 times faster than Internet Explorer.

To test Safari on my machine, I went to the download page and was greeted to download Safari and QuickTime (the default option). Why is Apple pushing me to download and install QuickTime when all I wanted is Safari alone? This is not the first time Apple is doing such a thing: when I went to QuickTime download page, I was defaulted to download and install iTune too.

After the installation, I fired up Safari wondering how on earth Apple has made it the easiest-to-use web browser. So, I typed google and pressed Ctrl + Enter. Nothing happened. It doesn't support Ctrl + Enter. But, when I just pressed Enter, it correctly sent me to www.google.com. And, it did a good job to send me to popular web pages without me having to type complete address and to press Ctrl + Enter. But, for not-so-famous sites, it is really a pain to have to type the complete address. So, this is not the easiest-to-use.

After I got to Google, I wanted to open my email. So, I typed www.gmail.com and pressed Alt + Enter. Nothing happened again. I can't open a new tab in a way that both Firefox and IE (and probably Opera too) support. To open my email, I had to press Ctrl + T and then type the address. So, where is the easiest-to-use factor of Safari?


Now, having opened two tabs in Safari, I wanted to check the memory consumption. I opened Task Manager and it is elegantly eating up 100+ MB of RAM. It happened in Firefox only when more than 10 tabs are open at the same time. Is Safari the best web browser then?


After being disappointed by its memory usage, I tried to close my email and suddenly a UI inconsistency appeared. Apple seemed to have forgotten that they were doing it now for Windows users where the minimize, maximize and close buttons are always on the right hand side of the UI elements. They did remember it when they created the standard windows buttons on the upper right hand corner of the Safari window. But, they put the close-tab button on the left hand side of the tab, which is a surprise factor in UI and which means bad. The best web browser would not confuse the users with such inconsistencies in the user interface.

But, I will be fair on this issue. The browser is still in beta, so it can have glitches that we can hope will be fixed in the final version. (Just hope that Apple will not keep Safari for Windows in perpetual Beta like Google is doing.)

Until then...

Justin

Update: In Safari, Ctrl + Mouse Scroll Wheel to adjust the font size of pages doesn't work too. Both IE and Firefox support it although the way to increase the font size is opposite in each of them.

Technorati Tag: Apple, Safari