Today Apple has released a Windows build of their KHTML-based browser Safari. This is great for those of us who’ve been waiting for a Windows KHTML browser to test our sites with - I’ve already found one of my sites that uses AJAX that not only doesn’t quite work properly, but also crashes Safari occasionally … not a good user experience! If you’ve not done so already, I suggest checking out your sites with Safari - layouts seem to be mostly fine (as you’d expect with a browser that is ACID2 compliant) but it seems that it chokes on some javascript.
Apple are making big claims about the performance of Safari in comparison to the other browsers (i.e, Firefox, IE and Opera), with apparently Opera coming out as the closest competitor. I’ve had a quick play around and I cant say I’ve seen any major difference in performance compared to Firefox 2.0.0.4, except that Firefox is hugely quicker to go backward and forward (thanks to its caching), whilst Safari is wildly quicker to start than Firefox.
One thing that really struck me that I’d not previously noticed with Safari or Konqueror when using Apples or Linux machines is the way that KHTML renders the page. Take a look at this side-by-side example of Firefox (left) and Safari (right):
Personally I think the Safari rendering is a lot nicer - some people say that it has a certain “fuzzy” look to it and to an extent I agree with them, but it certainly feels a lot easier on the eye this way.
Anyway - its pretty obvious what Apple are up to here. Kudos for giving us a new browser to play with, but is it really necessary to shove the Mac OS X style scroll bars and form widgets down our throats? They should be careful though if they give Windows users all the pretty software, what is the incentive to migrate to a Mac?! 
But enough of this tongue-in-cheek nonsense; I’ll have a go at benchmarking loading times and so on versus Firefox and perhaps opera to see if Apple’s claims really stack up to it, so stay tuned!
Update: After benchmarking Safari against Firefox, it would seem that Safari isn’t as fast as Apple claim it to be!
June 12th, 2007 at 7:25 pm
Font anti-aliasing is one of the issues in Firefox that will be addressed in Fx3 (later this year.) Work on the anti-aliasing was put off until the Cairo rendering engine was implemented.