"Today, we put the Safari 3 beta to the test to see how it compares to Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 on Windows. What we found didn't impress us very much. Although Safari offers slightly faster page loading, the beta is extremely unstable and suffers from interface deficiencies that make its value on the Windows platform questionable at best," writes Ryan Paul at Ars Technica.
The most glaring flaw of Safari 3 on Windows is its utter lack of stability. The prerelease beta status of Safari 3 obviously must be taken into account when evaluating the program's reliability, but the problems I faced during testing really exceed tolerable limits for beta software. The Firefox 3 alpha build I reviewed last week is far more stable and robust than the current beta build of Safari 3.
The review mentions Apple's determination to ignore standard Windows practices and interface conventions -- the sort of arrogance that annoys Mac users if Windows programs are inadequately converted for OS X. Paul also mentions Apple's use of its own Mac OS X font anti-aliasing, which makes Safari's rendering look fuzzy and [insert] to me less legible than Microsoft's ClearType (see Joel on Software for a fuller account), and Safari's security problems. As it's a First Look, he skips various other things, such as the parental controls feature in the Windows version that seems to need Mac OS X.
He does think Safari offers a "modest increase in rendering performance" (perhaps not everywhere) but reckons this is "hardly worth the deficiencies, and Safari's user interface simply doesn't provide the usability or flexibility of competing products."
All round, Safari's instability, insecurity and inadequate platform conversion suggest it's a rushed if not a botched job that should have been described as an alpha.
And if that's the case, you have to wonder about the hype. Perhaps Steve Jobs felt he really needed something to make a splash at WWDC07 and Safari for Windows was the best they could do. If so, the job could still have been done with a more honest presentation of the state of the Safari for Windows code. In this case it would have been better to underpromise and overdeliver, even if that's not Steve Jobs's style.
