Safari 3.01 Beta for Windows

The Features

It’s getting harder and harder to really zero in on the individual features of browsers these days. They’ve all got tabbed browsing, download managers form auto-completion and some form of pop-up blocking by default. Safari has all the stuff we’ve come to expect as standard features, plus a couple of new tricks up its sleeve.

The first comes in the form of a ‘private browsing’ function. While nothing more than a simple one-click way to turn off the storing of any cookies, history or other traceable information that will lead your significant other/parents to the ‘special’ websites you visit, it’s neat.

Another slightly nifty feature is the ability via Safari to re-size any text field on a website. Just grab the corner and drag it around, the site will manoeuvre around the text box to accommodate it. Apple says this is because we might have a lot to say, we suspect it won’t be about resizeable text fields, because a practical use isn’t apparent.

The find feature of Safari - although functionally unremarkable – has that same grace and cool factor that permeates most Apple products. Plug in your find word criteria, and the entire webpage dims slightly, leaving the words that match your search in a much brighter box. As you cycle through matches to find ‘next’ the current match gets an orange box around it, and though you’ll hate us for saying it again – the orange box does a ‘blob’ type animation. It’s really a lot more fun than it sounds.

The find feature of Safari proves that you don’t require technical leaps to make an age-old feature better. Using a nice fade effect on the browser screen easily highlights your search terms and each match you cycle through has an orange bounding box around it for super easy locating.

Conclusion

When dealing with a Beta release of anything, it’s important to balance up the fact it’s a work-in-progress with the realization that what you’re seeing now will no doubt be fairly indicative of the final product.

Where does that leave Safari? Not in all that bad a place.

It’s got raw speed where it counts, and although many users reported a host of bugs with version 3.0, our experience with 3.01 revealed no screen freezes or bad rendering of pages. The same goes for the ‘zero day’ security vulnerabilities. They were hellishly bad DoS and remote code execution flaws but they’re patched for 3.01 and all part of the shaky journey that is Alpha and Beta life.

The real question here is are we interested enough in another browser in any form on the market? Most people who are aware of a choice beyond Internet Explorer have already spent a lot of time crafting Firefox or Opera to their tastes. They’ve got all the right plugins and preferences and won’t see a point in moving to Safari for its sleek Apple stylings. It might be downloaded for curiosities sake and left at that.

For those who haven’t yet signed over their loyalty to a particular browser or who have a fetish for skinning Windows to resemble Mac OS X as closely as possible, there’s certainly promise in Safari.

Apples effort sits comfortably in the not stellar but not crap territory, and if raw performance can be tweaked further for final release we could see some serious brushed aluminium competition in the Windows browser world.