Originally my experience with Safari was only limited to the occasional usage of my girlfriend’s iMac, and I always like the idea of no status bar in the bottom but showing the loading progress of a page right inside the URL textbox at the top. After knowing that the newest version of Safari 3 (in beta) is made available to Windows, I immediately download and install it to my work computer which runs on Windows XP to check it out. In fact I am writing this post using it right now.

First impression – it runs noticeably faster than IE7 and Firefox 2. It uses different font types with everything inside the browser, and the look-and-feel is similar to iTunes in Windows (actually this article explains pretty well the difference of fonts between apple and windows). The tabs are repositionable which is the same as IE7, but I can also pull them out as a separate window. I personally like this feature coz 90% of the time I would have all the browsing done under the same window with multiple tabs, but 10% of the time I may want to compare the information between 2 tabs side-by-side and this feature can be useful. One thing that surprises me is that when I minimize the Safari window, the memory usage drops from 24MB to less than 2MB and it happens instantly. Of course when I restore the window it goes back up. Still I dont see the same thing with IE7 or Firefox 2. Also Safari picks up a history list of websites that I have visited before from somewhere, but some of them looks like I havent visited for a long time so I am not sure what it is.

Since it is still in beta there are a few glitches. The maximize button takes almost a second to work; and if I minimize and then restore it forgets that it has been maximized before every time. Try to play with some videos in Microsoft’s Silverlight and it does not work properly as expected. Browsing from one page to another occasionally the browser would lose its focus for no reason. Live.com does not work at all. Gmail works fine, but the built-in Google Talk is not. Yahoo mail works with warning messages popping out. I finally test Safari against Microsoft’s Popfly, and it crashes completely.

Well I am sure Safari will get better in the future, and releasing it on Windows is a great move for Apple. They have done it with iTunes + iPod before, and even this time it may have little to do with iPhone’s release they do it again with Safari. More importantly Safari is indeed faster than other browsers, and they are now available for both Mac and Windows user to experience it.