I have been playing with Safari 3 on Mac OS X Tiger and Windows XP lately to see how it compares to Firefox. Safari 3 definitely launches faster than Firefox on both my Mac and PC, and it also seems to render pages faster. The RSS reader is still one of the best I have seen in any of the browsers although I have switched to Google Reader to keep track of my RSS feeds.
There are still some annoying page rendering differences between Firefox and Safari, and I’m not quite sure who to blame. Is it Apple that hasn’t built in support for the latest web standards, or is it the web designers that have built their website to look good on IE and Firefox? As a content creator, it is incredibly frustrating to me that each browser has its own quirks. My site looks perfect on Firefox and Safari, but it looks like crap in IE 6. For that, I place the blame on Microsoft for baking in a whole lot of proprietary code into IE 6. IE 7 does a much better job at rendering standards based pages, but it still has a ways to go.
I could go on and on forever about bad page rendering, but I did have a point for this post. Safari 3 has a really cool new feature that I have come to use a lot. Under the Window menu, there are two new options: Move Tab to New Window and Merge All Windows. I don’t have a whole lot of use for the first option, but I really like the Merge All Windows option. I have come to really enjoy using Tabs while browsing the Internet, and sometimes, a link will automatically open in a new window. I have to admit, it drives me nuts when this happens, and the Merge All Windows option has been a huge help.
Apple has once again introduced a great new feature to make browsing the Internet faster and easier. Now if they can get together with the major web sites to make sure the pages render properly, I’ll be a happy camper.
