Blogosphere pans, praises Safari 3

Apple’s just-released public beta of the Safari 3 Web browser — the first version to run on Windows as well as Mac OS X — is drawing fervent and sometimes heated reactions from early testers. The following is an unexpurgated sample of what bloggers, ranging from grumpy Windows users to Mac fanboys, had to say in the immediate aftermath of Monday’s Safari 3 announcement:

Is Safari faster than Steve Jobs speeding on Hwy. 280 in his Mercedes SL AMG? “I miss the spell-checking, but damn — this gives Opera a run for it’s [sic] money in terms of speed. I just tested loading my homepage with both of them, and I have no doubts about it.” — Griffith, Forever Geek

“After downloading and installing Safari on XP (w/ 1GB RAM, P4 3Ghz, yada yada yada), I have to say that it is a complete joke … the browser is just so horribly slow. Did they test this? It takes literally at least 5x longer to render pages in Safari than Firefox. Sometimes even longer. Very sad.” — Doug, Read/ Write Web

“I did a comparison of loading CNN on both browsers,and Safari beat Firefox by a mile.” — Hoobam, Download Squad

“The more I run Safari on Vista, the faster it launches. Am I hallucinating? Is there a cosmic force that means just when I complain about Safari taking 57 seconds to launch, as soon as that complaint is made public, it launches much more quickly? Am I going insane? Or is someone playing a clever prank on me?” — Joel Spolsky, Joel On Software

Fonts: fuzzier than a peach skin?

“If you sit really close to the monitor, then the Windows way is better. However, if you move back a couple of feet (3 feet or so from the screen to your eyes), then the Apple way seems more readable. The Apple rendering is definitely darker.” — Brendan Dowling, Coding Horror

“It looks like they’ve skewed the contrast of the fonts to an absurdly low level. I’m curious why Apple’s default font rendering strategies, to my eye — and to the eyes of at least two other people — are visibly inferior to Microsoft’s on typical LCD displays. This is exactly the kind of graphic designer-ish detail I’d expect Cupertino to get right, so it’s all the more surprising to me that they apparently haven’t.” — Jeff Atwood, Coding Horror

“In Safari, go to Edit/Preferences … and then select the Appearance tab. For “Font smoothing,” choose Light (the default is Medium). Much better now. Not perfect, mind you, but much better.” — Tom, Coding Horror

“I also noticed that if I increase the font size, Apple-style anti-aliasing becomes tolerable. I’m beginning to think that the differences are. 1) Apple doesn’t hand-tune the font aliasing hints for smaller font sizes. 2) Apple chose a much, much darker contrast level for its anti-aliasing algorithm.” — Jeff Atwood, Coding Horror

And now for today’s bug report….

“Seems like the only website my Safari works with is Apple’s own homepage.

Crashed about 15 times and I’ve only been _trying_ to use it for an hour.”

—  Brandon, Download Squad

“I installed Safari, and every single time I attempt to bookmark something, it crashes — hard.” — EJ Passeos, TechCrunch

“The only browser unable to correctly display a Google result page. Wow.”

—  Xavier, TechCrunch

“Oh damn, I just crashed with Safari at the 1st Google request by entering Japanese characters.” — Eirikur, Engadget

“ALL the menu dropdowns don’t work (they are just empty). Half the text is missing on many pages. URL bar doesn’t work. Selects a non standard font for the pages. Need some more?” — ScOObyDoo, Engadget

Well, how about the new features?

“The most notable new feature is an improved Firefox-style way to search for text on a Web page. Hit Control-F, and an oval search box appears towards the top of the window. Type your search term, hit enter, and watch the page go gray with your search terms highlighted in white or bright orange (that’s the selected result).” — Narasu Rebbapragada, PC World

“Tabbed browsing? Been done. Easy Bookmarks? Been done. Popup blocking? Old news. Inline Find — stunning visually but also been done. SnapBack? This is a gimicky [sic] back button — not good enough. Forms autofill — zzz. Built-in RSS — yawn. When are we getting to the good stuff? Er … okay, so that’s it, there is nothing new here.” — Vincent Maher, Media in Transition

“The display window is VERY clean; even the status bar at the bottom of most Windows applications is missing (configurable to have it return) to give maximum viewable area. Notably absent are the OS X style green, yellow, and red Window controls in the top right of every dialog window — stylized but otherwise standard Minimize, Maximize, and Close buttons are found instead.” — Scratching The Surface

“If it wasn’t so damn ugly, and made use of more than 2 mouse buttons (no middle button click-to-scroll or back/forward at present), it may be useful. I admit the WebKit is rather snappy at displaying web pages but I can’t stand the interface.” — Lizard.boy, Download Squad

The final word(s)?

“The new version is 3 and really it does what they claim, SPEED. The only problem is I have become so comfortable with Firefox that just speed isn’t enough for me to switch.” — Jeremy Jones, Multimedia-PCs.com

“It’s like software from a different world installed on a Windows-powered computer (much like how Windows users might initially find iTunes).” — J. Angelo Racoma, J Spot

“I’ve used it for a good 4 hours straight just surfing along a bunch of websites and stuff. It is a lot faster than Firefox, which was my browser of choice, and it is much faster than IE. There are a bit of glitches on it, which is understandable since it is a beta. Once all the features are perfected and the glitches are fixed it’ll be a find [sic] browser.” — Jae, Engadget

“I’m surprised nobody has said that XP/Vista is making Safari crash 😉 After all you know, Apple can do no wrong.” — ssummer, Engadget