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For most people the current browser wars consist of two combatants, Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox. Looking in from the outside are alternative browsers that might be interesting but aren't seen as much of a threat to take up lots of market share, such as Opera, which is innovative but unknown to many users, and Safari, which is generally seen as a browser for Mac users (even though there has been a Windows version for almost a year now).
But with the release this week of Safari 3.1, Apple just may have laid claim to being top dog for a key segment of Web surfers. That's because if you're looking for a clean, simplified, and fast Web browser, right now Safari 3.1 is the best choice, whether one is a Windows or Mac user.
And clean is the key attribute of Safari now. As other browsers have continued to become more feature rich but also a bit bloated, Safari has kept to a basic and fairly simple interface and feature set.
Most of the new interface features in Version 3.1 are pretty basic and have been found in competing browsers for a while now. Safari 3.1 now has better tab management, making it easier to move tabbed windows by dragging them.
A new find in page feature has a nice twist by darkening everything on the Web page except for the term entered in the Find field. And like other browsers Safari 3.1 now has a private browsing feature that removes all traces of a browsing session.
In fact, one of the only really unique (and actually pretty cool) new features in Safari 3.1 was for resizing form fields. With this feature it was possible to select any form field in a Web page and drag it to a much larger size, especially useful for those extra long blog comments.
In the previous version Safari on Windows was clearly inferior to its Mac sibling and while the Mac version still has some features that won't be found on Windows (mainly those such as Web Clips that use Mac OS X features), it is now much improved. I especially liked that it now works more like a real Windows application, unlike the previous version which felt like a Mac program vacationing in Windows land.
Much of the attention of this release has focused on the speed of the browser and while I find comparisons of speed in modern browsers to be over-rated (in most cases meaning something loads in half a second as opposed to one second) Safari 3.1 does seem to be a fairly quick browser.
On the standards side Safari 3.1 also does very well, both in support of currently common standards and in cutting edge standards, with some support for new HTML 5 specifications including the new embedded video element. For now Safari also has the distinction of the best score on the Web Standards Project's Acid3 test, scoring a 75 in my tests which puts it ahead of all shipping and beta browsers out right now, falling behind only the nightly builds of WebKit.
Of course most of the speed and standards support capabilities in Safari come from the open-source WebKit framework on which it is based. WebKit is also used by other Web applications including Adobe's AIR.
But while Safari 3.1 does very well when the focus is on speed and simplicity, this does come at the cost of extended capabilities. Browsers such as Firefox offer much more in the way of extended functionality, especially if the added features of the many extensions are considered.
But right now, for users who don't need those features and who just want a simple and fast Web browser, Safari 3.1 might just be the best choice.
To download the free Safari 3.1 go to http://www.apple.com/safari/
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Comments (17)
The best way to speed up Safari browsing is to use an ad-blocker such as Pith Helmet. During the switch from Safari 2 to Safari 3, I had to do without Pith Helmet for a week, and I was astonished to see just how heavily pages containing a handful of animated adverts clobbered my performance.
Posted by Ian Kemmish | March 20, 2008 1:04 PM
I can't seem to locate an ad-blocker for Safari on Windows. My Firefox (version 2.0) is currently speedier (up to 35%) due to Adblock and NoScript extensions.
Posted by Brian Fisher | March 20, 2008 5:16 PM
Will Safari ever work with Windows 2000 Professional? Is there a way to make Safari 3.1 work on a Windows 2000 PRO system?
Posted by BG Layfield | March 21, 2008 10:41 AM
Please... why do you always want to forget about Opera as an alternative?? It works on Mac, Windows, Linux, cellphones! The latest Alpha release is very fast and good.
Posted by bob | March 21, 2008 2:28 PM
Hmmm. My experience with Safari 3.1 was the opposite: It's WAY SLOWER than Firefox or IE7 on my Vista Business machine. And it doesn't work on all sites....
Posted by Owen | March 21, 2008 3:02 PM
After the last time I installed Safari and the way it half worked, I would never bother again - it would need to come with a free coffee maker built in to make it worthwhile even considering installing for me.
Posted by Paul Fletcher | March 21, 2008 3:37 PM
Hmm, installed Safari 3.1 yesterday on my Mac Pro - which has 5 GB of RAM and is working perfectly.
Finding - pages like my Yahoo! home page and >this eWeek article
So there's been no detectable improvements in this browser other than perhaps improve security since the Safari 2.x releases.
Posted by J. Noel | March 21, 2008 4:05 PM
last message incomplete:
Loading pages like Yahoo! home page and this eWeek article take
about 26 seconds. No improvement in this very slow browser.
Posted by J. Noel | March 21, 2008 4:07 PM
Safari 3.1 on Windows is a lot snappier and quicker for my Windows XP laptop. IMHO, Firefox as good as it is is starting to become bloatware. One suggestion though...Try cleaning out all of the porn from your computer before critizing the speed of this great browser alternative!
Posted by Brad | March 22, 2008 1:42 AM
J. Noel wrote:
"Loading pages like Yahoo! home page and this eWeek article take about 26 seconds. No improvement in this very slow browser"
ARE YOU KIDDING ME? This article took under 3 seconds to load in Safari. You must really check your system out.
Safari is a good alternative, as is Camino and Opera.
-Rodney
Posted by Rodney | March 25, 2008 8:38 AM
Safari is nice, but there are more than a few issues -- other than occasional crashes due to out of memory errors. Both banks I use require an activeX control for security and wire transfers -- which of course don't work in Safari. I follow tennis, and like to watch matches that aren't televised in the U.S.; unfortunately, the ATP's video only works in IE and not in Safari.
You can blame Microsoft for its proprietary software, but those are real issues and drawbacks of Safari.
Posted by JimF | March 26, 2008 2:09 PM
I have all four browser and use them....i.e. IE7, Firefox, Opera, and Safari 3.1. On my Window XP system Safari is faster. I agree with other comments regarding cleaning up the junk on your system, especially the register.
Posted by MIL | March 26, 2008 2:25 PM
Safari's render speed is offset by more initial delay before the page loads. I'm a long way from trusting its security, too.
No browser renders CSS 2.1 perfectly. Safari, Firefox and Opera are very good; IE trails.
My brower of choice for Windows XP is Opera: it's the fastest overall, stable, and has a great security record.
With FireFox 3 and IE8 on the horizon, all of this will have to be re-evaluated.
Posted by KenI | March 26, 2008 3:29 PM
>JimF : does your insurance company requires you to drive only Ford cars models ? And only the ones with transmission problem that have been recalled this year (2008 Ford F-250) ?
Come on, your both banks ask you to use AND Explorer AND Windows the only system IE runs on). They are the 2 main sources of Zombies machines. Swiss banks in Europe ask their clients NOT TO use Explorer in order to avoid malwares and passwords steals.
To require ActiveX means they don't have a website, but they've
make a Windows applications for their clients. Maybe it's time for them to think about a real website accessible from all computers, including Blackberry and iPhone too.
Posted by Mike | March 28, 2008 4:02 AM
Safari, at this time, is probably the buggiest web browser out there. Apple patched 13 flaws in March. Right after they found more.
Considering it hasn't been out for much of last year, it had the greatest percentage of flaws for the year - more than IE or Firefox.
Posted by Gis | April 17, 2008 11:19 AM
Hmmm ... because of lack of anti-phishing Pay Pal is actually thinking of BANNING Safari from its Web site.
The mobile version is even worse, due to lack of screen space not even letting one read the url that they are visiting.
Great recommendation as long as security is not important. Oh wait ... everyone who reads this column is such an expert that security problems could NEVER happen to them. NOT.
One should probably use a browser where security is taken seriously by the programmers, not just speed. If you run Windows, since you can't actually remove Internet Explorer, you should use it, so that you don't have additional browsers to patch (FireFox up to 2.0.0.14 this week.) If you are trying to be safe, run as a non-administrator or use drop-my-rights to run IE. On Macintosh, FireFox is probably the best alternative.
Oh, yeah, can you remove Safari from your Macs??
Posted by PMC | April 20, 2008 9:03 PM
Not on my computers until they fix security, e.g., anti-phishing. Pay-Pal probably knows more about this problem than we typical users do since it costs them money every day.
Posted by figment | May 1, 2008 8:21 AM