Time to go on Safari?

Alex Kidman | Feb 25, 2009 9:46 AM

Apple's announcement of Safari 4.0 Beta has Alex Kidman pondering. Is it time to switch browsers again?

Overnight Apple released a Beta version of its Safari browser for Mac and Windows users and I've been giving it a bit of a play in the couple of hours I've had.

Now, I should point out before I start that I'm not a Safari user per se; my browser of choice is (and has been for quite some time, dating well back to my pre-Mac days) Firefox. I like Firefox, and I'm pretty comfortable with it, although I'm not unaware of its failings, especially in the gobbling-up-memory department.

Apple's pitching the beta of Safari at speed freaks; the official press release states that it "executes JavaScript up to 30 times faster than IE 7 and more than three times faster than Firefox 3. Safari quickly loads HTML web pages three times faster than IE 7 and almost three times faster than Firefox 3."

Given it's been a long time since Microsoft last refreshed IE for Mac (sarcasm intentional), they had to be benchmarking under Windows for that part of the test. Hey - Apple's using Windows for an important task! Quick! Start a flame war!

Actually, I'd be keen to find out if Apple was running both the Windows and Mac versions of Safari for all tests. My experience with Apple's Windows software has never been that positive, to be honest. I really hated iTunes -- right up until the moment I ran it on a Mac, and it "just worked".

I only ever dabbled with the Windows version of Safari, and was struck at the time that I couldn't quite see the point, beyond luring developers to work with Webkit in a tangential, iPhone-related way.

Anyway, speed figures are always subject to interpretation, as well as the magic words "up to" that can qualify just about anything. Apple was using iBench and SunSpider to test performance, and real-world performance could be markedly different, especially in the Australian marketplace, where the one thing we've got in abundance is super-speedy reliable Internet by the bucketload. Why, our broadband system is the envy of the world -- isn't it?

In speed terms, I was impressed with how quickly Safari downloaded, but then Apple's arrangements for file distribution are usually very good, MobileMe notwithstanding. I installed Safari 4, and started comparing it to Firefox.

Straight away there's a few oddities. I've had to uninstall Growl, as for whatever reason it's now crashing whenever I open Mail. I can only presume some kind of shared rendering engine problem, as the Safari Beta is the only thing I've thrown onto my Mac recently, and the problems started straight after installation.

Then again, Safari does have that magic "Beta" qualifier, which does act, as I noted the other week (http://www.pcauthority.com.au/BlogEntry/136813,windows-7-vs-os-x-the-os-war-is-definitely-on.aspx), as something of a get out of gaol free card.

Some of Safari's new features, such as the Coverflow-style history browsing aren't all that appealing -- and could be (ahem) "interesting" depending on the site history that it chooses to cache -- but the Top Sites feature, which gives you a quick view of your commonly visted sites could be nifty.

Not exactly unique or groundbreaking, but implemented well (and Apple's pretty good at implementation) it could become a pretty good feature. Likewise, I'll be splitting my browsing use between Safari and Firefox for the next couple of weeks to see whether Apple's finally cracked my browser resistance.