I’ve been using the new Safari for Windows Beta for a few hours now, and here are my collective thoughts:
- The font smoothing is very nice, once you turn it down to light. The default medium is too strong, and looks stronger than OS X’s medium setting.
- It crashes quite a lot, this really is beta software.
- Aqua form widgets on Windows! Better than the ugly Firefox ones at least
- No option to force all links to open in tabs instead of new windows, even when I middle-click. This mainly happens in GMail. Incredibly annoying.
- No inline spell checker, bah.
- Damn, it really is fast.
- Why doesn’t the back button on my mouse work? Seriously, how hard can that be to implement?
- The inline search is amazingly powerful, I know Firefox has had it for a while but the implementation in Safari is much better.
- Resizable text boxes making blogging much easier through the WordPress web interface.
- Strange how many OS X conventions they used for a Windows application, the lack of OK and Cancel buttons in the Preferences window especially. Find if you’re used to them though.
- Drop down lists render like Aqua widgets sometimes, but other times in some strange style I’ve never seen before.
- The Windows version is also desperatly crying out for SafariStand of Saft so we can get some more customisation out of it!
Overall a very nice beta that does have it’s fair share of problems. If Apple (or a third party developer) can fix these at the final launch in October, I can see myself switching to Safari on Windows.