Are you, dear reader one of those people who downloaded Apple Safari 3 beta for windows? I am, and for sure I will not switch to Safari. I am pretty happy with my current configuration. Primarily I use Firefox with lots of extensions, and I can’t imagine not having it. It’s basically first application I install on clear system. It may not be the fastest (actually for most sites it’s the slowest of all browsers I use), it may eat up lots of RAM and processor cycles, but user experience blows all other browsers away. To make things clear. Bare Firefox, with no extensions at all, is nice, but if I for some reason could not install extensions to it, I would use Opera, that is great product, but basically lacks one thing, that makes me use it only occasionally, for things like banking: no adblock plus. Adbock plus is THE ultimate Firefox extension. The first one I install, right after I install Firefox. To paraphrase Scott Hanselman: “Wladimir Palant should have a licence to print money”.
I have IE, like everyone using windows, but I actually almost don’t use it at all. I used it for sites that had WMV video embedded, before MS released Firefox extension to support that, and now I only use it to visit sites that were designed by troglodytes unaware of the fact, that there is word beside IE.
My friend at work has Apple MacBook pro, and he had showed me once the great RSS reader built into it, and it was basically the only reason why I downloaded the browser – to see if the windows version has this reader as well. Safari as a tool to browse web sites simply is the worst of all browsers I have. Let images speak for thousand words: below are screenshots of my blog, in all 4 browsers, in 800×600.
On all 3 first browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera) site looks basically the same. IE folds blog subtitle few lines earlier than Firefox and Opera, but user experience stays the same. Now let’s take a look at our new born ‘hero’. Blog title: gone, blog subtitle: gone as well, post titles: same as before. What else – look at the tag cloud: some tags were changed to underline. Steve Jobs said that it is wicked fast – well I didn’t see this speed. I didn’t measure the time of load, but it feels that even Firefox is faster (on those several sites I visited).
I will give a try to the built in RSS reader, that looks very promising, but except for this: Safari is one big disappointment and misunderstanding. It’s like a step back, even comparing to IE7. Not recommended.