It's been a couple of days since Steve Jobs announced Safari for Windows. Curious about Apple's vision of internet browsing, especially given my personal history, I downloaded it Monday night and gave it a test drive on a couple of machines.
- It's slow, taking a very long time to load.
- The font rendering is hard to read, and downright irritating. Just try to read sites designed with white text on a black background. Yuck!
- It doesn't have any built-in plug-in download mechanism. How 1990's!
- When returning to a large page, it renders text without graphics placeholders first. That means that although it will find the spot on the page where you were, so you can resume reading, it may suddenly jump as graphics are rendered above. Did I mention it's slow? It might take 30 seconds or more before it suddenly starts to randomly zip around.
My HP tablet was already overloaded with software and a little flaky. To add insult to injury, after installing Safari the buggy video driver in the tablet, which used to crash every couple of days or so, now caused a spontaneous reboot every 10 minutes necessitating a rebuild of the PC.
Give this dog a pass. "Insanely great" it ain't. Perhaps by the time they get to version 3 they'll have the bugs worked out.
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