Monday, June 11, 2007

Safari ported to Windows.

But will anybody use it?
by AC - permalink

Apple has released the Safari 3 public beta, and for the first time it's available for Windows XP and Vista. This might actually be kind of a big deal. Safari has been recognized for a long while as one of the better browsers available, but being limited to the Mac it's been dominated by Internet Explorer and Firefox in the market share reports. I believe Safari 2 was the first major browser to pass the Acid2 test, followed by Konquerer, Opera 9, and the Firefox 3 alphas.

Apparently it's fairly buggy on Windows, but that's not unexpected. I'll hold off installing it for a more stable beta or the final release, but I'm looking forward to playing around with it. There are a lot of browsers out there, but unfortunately most of them are either useless or made obsolete by the elites. The only ones I use on a consistent basis are Firefox, Flock, and Opera. The addition of another high-quality browser to the Windows market should help push the others to get even better, which is good for everybody.

UPDATE 11:53PM -- I went ahead and downloaded it a couple of hours ago. Seems decent enough, but it isn't blowing me away. I don't know what to make of the bookmark interface, which seems to hide most links from you, forcing you to open the full bookmark manager. It's weird. On the security side, Safari has reportedly already been compromised in several different ways. This doesn't mean exploits are already in the wild, of course, but the potential is there.

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