Safari 3 vs. Firefox 2 and IE7

Bobcat writes "Ars Technica has a 'first look' at Safari for Windows, which is interesting because it's written from the perspective of someone new to Safari. It was tested against Firefox 2 and IE7 and aside from the slightly faster page loading, Ars didn't find much to recommend it to Windows users. 'The modest increase in rendering performance is hardly worth the deficiencies, and Safari's user interface simply doesn't provide the usability or flexibility of competing products. If the folks at Apple think that providing Windows users with a taste of Mac OS X through Safari is going to entice them to buy a Mac, it's going to take a better effort than the Safari 3 beta. Even if the final release is more polished and completely bug-free, it still won't be as powerful or feature-loaded as Opera or Firefox.'"

Comments

Audience

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Even if the final release is more polished and completely bug-free, it still won't be as powerful or feature-loaded as Opera or Firefox.

I agree. Unless Safari manages some magical plug-i compatibility with Firefox, it is unlikely to ever be as feature-loaded as Opera or Firefox. don't think Apple is aiming at "feature loaded" so much as "better for normal users." Most users don't care if they can create granular block lists and flip javascript on and off quickly, because most users don't do those things. Safari seems to be aiming at the crowd who wants simple and fast. As for power, well that all depends upon your needs and workflow. Maybe I need to have really easy access to a grammar checker, but I don't know squat about configuring computer programs. With Safari, it "just works" (or does it, on the OS X version it does, not sure about Windows). A real world example of power is taking screenshots of Web UIs. This is something I have to do now and again. In the past, I've used OmniWeb because it allowed me to recode the pages on the fly easily, so I could fudge the sizes of text boxes and eliminate useless whitespace (thereby making a clearer, larger image). With Safari 3, I can just drag those text boxes to the size I want, which is more powerful yet and more usable.

For other workflows, I'm sure Firefox or Opera is more powerful. Apple is aiming at the bulk of users, instead of at all users. I don't now if such an approach will work though, on Windows. The average person on Windows doesn't know anything about browsers and will never download Safari, so unless Apple has a way to get it onto desktops, their seeming target audience and likely target audience are quite different.

Buggy Even on the Mac

[CrazyTalk]

I love my Mac, but several times a day the Safari web browser crashes (Sorry, "Closes Unexpectedly") for no reason. This is especially frustrating when I go back and click on the exact same link or attempt to do the same action (watch a youtube video, etc) and the browser crashes again in the same way.

Re:Horrid UI

[Phroggy]

It astounds me that Apple flips the bird to all of the Windows UI conventions for marketing purposes and nobody seems to care. Everything from their own anti-aliasing algorithm for text, their own custom widgets, to windows that you can only resize from the right corner. Of course, many legit Windows applications do the same thing, but it seems highly hypocritical of Apple to say, "you should stick to conventions when designing UIs" and then hardcode their own ideas in when developing on another platform. You're obviously not a Mac user! You'd be far less astounded by this if you understood that Apple has a history of flipping the bird to all of the Mac UI conventions for marketing purposes. I'd say this dates back to about QuickTime 4. Eventually, Apple documented some of their own UI abuses, such as the arbitrary use of the brushed metal theme instead of the standard Aqua theme. It sounds like Leopard will have some convergence between new Mac UI guidelines and the actual UI of Apple's new apps, though, which will be good!

Re:Review summary: "It's not the same as FireFox"

[badasscat]

If the Windows conventions were good, I'd agree with you. However, anything is an improvement over Windows conventions.

Come on; it's shocking as a Mac user to see all you Windows guys suddenly defending Safari now that it's available on your PC's. A lot of Mac users hate Safari. Many of us use Firefox.

Safari on Mac doesn't follow Mac conventions either. It just received its first update in like a year, and it doesn't seem to have helped much. Safari:Mac = IE:Windows. We feel pretty much the same way about it.

I use Safari on Mac only to test; that's about all it's good for, but its rendering engine always makes things look significantly different than any other browser so, like IE, as a designer you kind of just have to accept its quirks. I run Firefox as my primary browser on both Mac and PC.

btw, I did try Safari on Windows. The first time I opened more than 10 tabs simultaneously, it froze. Yes, it's a beta, but a pretty unusable one if it fails at its basic core function.

Re:Missing the point

[paanta]

I know people who use it by default in OS X. It's actually great that it's the default browser. If you're too computer illiterate to go get Firefox or Opera, Safari is right up your alley. You're not the sort of person who needs powerful features.