June 11, 2007
Safari for Windows Quicky Review

So I finally managed to download Safari for windows (ironically it only worked for me in IE, not Firefox).

Pros:
Nice look.
Nifty appleness with the input field highlighting.
Nice working with RSS.
Sheets work and look nice for bookmarks, RSS, etc.
Built in bug reporting from the toolbar, including option to send in screenshot as well... nice and fast and will no doubt lower the barrier to entry for bug reports.
Plugins seem to work out of the gate.
Nice font smoothing, cleartype-ish, almost a little too cleartypeish for me though.
Gorgeous apple native widgets.
Dragging around tabs works nicely and is great visually (drag a tag off the window and it gives you a shaded thumbnail of the new browser window that'll appear.
In page find is great and spotlight like.

Cons:
My MS mouse back button doesn't work.
No adblock and other Firefox plugins I've grown used to.
No ctrl-backspace in text entry boxes and textareas.
No built in spellcheck in textareas (I'm very used to this in FF).

Other:
The way the address bar works I don't really like... in FF I can start typing in an address, then hit TAB to move to the autocomplete entries. In Safari TAB moves from the address bar to the search box, down arrow moves to the other autocomplete entries, which takes my hands off the home row. Maybe a familiarity thing, but kinda a con for me.

Sadly the lack of a working back button (might be just this particular computer... will test more when I get home tonight) and the lack of adblock are deal breakers for me :(





Posted by Arcterex at June 11, 2007 12:36 PM