Monday, June 18, 2007

Mac Safari for Windows

In case you were not aware, Apple released their browser, Safari, for windows last week. They reported there was over 1 million downloads in the first 48 hours.
You might consider giving it a try. They report that Safari is 1.6 times faster than Firefox in HTML performance, javascript performance, and application launch. With some basic browsing over the weekend at home I noticed a pretty big difference.

Here are some of the features I have come to love in Firefox that are missing in Safari; hopefully they will be added soon.

  1. They have a built in google search box but it doesn't provide suggestions (which I use all the time).
  2. Safari doesn't support the ability to close a tab with my mouse wheel click (I hate right clicking).
  3. No CRTL + ENT or CRTL + ALT + ENT to automatically complete keywords like wikipedia to http://www.wikipedia.org.
  4. When you click in the url, the url doesn't highlight. It just places the cursor where your mouse was instead of highlighting the whole url.
  5. Most importantly its missing the highly valuable restore session feature.
I couldn't consider seriously using safari, no matter how fast it is, until it supported a majority of these features that have made me an addict of firefox.

Posted by jlorenzen at 12:52 PM  

Labels:

1 comments:

Rob Madole said...

Just a few responses from a Mac user:

1. Closing a tab with the mouse wheel I didn't even know this was possible but I think a CTRL-W might be just as fast. For a Mac, the Command+w works and I have to say my fingers are well trained for it.

2. Auto-completing or URL completion You're right about the this one, it just isn't there.

3. Highlighting the URL when you click on it This one is a Mac-centric thing. Job's said in his keynote that Safari on Windows would feel like a Mac app and this applies to this behavior. On a Mac, the "triple-click" will highlight the entire address and I think Mac users are trained for this. I don't know if it works on Windows or not.

4. Session restore Yep again, this is missing. I wish it was there too. However, the only reason I use it in Firefox is when the browser crashes. I can't recall Safari ever crashing.

All that being said...I'm a Firefox user and I don't think Safari 3 is enough to make me switch even though the search highlighting is awesome.

June 25, 2007 at 12:20 PM  

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)