Safari 4: Thoughts and Comparisons
When news broke yesterday that the new version of Safari was available, I was heading out the door on the way to work. This meant I probably had some different impressions of the update than a lot of Mac users as I spent the first 8 hours using Safari 4 on Windows XP. And let me tell you, there are some differences between the two versions.
I jotted down some random thoughts during the day:
Speed
Speed seemed to be the overall improvement that everyone was talking about. Once I got home and used Safari 4 on my Macbook, I could agree—it’s blazing fast. But the Windows version was quite slow. I have 1 Gb of RAM on my Dell at work, which is only slightly less than my Macbook, so I don’t think that is the issue.
I have always found Safari to be sluggish overall on Windows and version 4 is no different.
Interface
The interface changed significantly for both versions. Very much so on Windows. My first five minutes on Safari in Windows was frightening—it seemed like everything that made me enjoy the browser on Windows had been taken away. Let me explain.
Be a Good Neighbor
I depend on a few applications to make computing experience on Windows XP as enjoyable as possible. iTunes is one and Safari is another. Safari, although slow on Windows, gives me a much better experience than all other browsers on the platform because Apple had built the browser to look and feel like a Mac app even though it’s running on Windows. My haven throughout the workday!
That changed yesterday. First, the tabs and title bar of the app now look like a native XP application. Boo. I recognize that it’s a good thing when applications from one platform are developed for another that they play nice and follow the conventions of the new platform1. I guess I feel like this should be the exception. Safari and iTunes spruce up my XP environment, and it felt wrong to see Safari suddenly more ‘Windows-ish’.
The font smoothing is Safari also changed. I’ve been using Chrome to run a couple of web apps on XP everyday because it’s much snappier than Safari. But it just looks bad compared with Safari—the fonts on web pages look like Internet Explorer 6. Safari was my saving grace in this regard.
I was shocked after my initial thirty seconds of using Safari 4 when I realized the font smoothing had changed. Horrified really. But a quick glance at the Preferences restored my heartbeat to normal levels. Here’s some screens from my Windows workstation showing the new preference option and a comparison of the settings:
Font smoothing set to the new default of Windows Standard displays like this (click the images to see a close up of the font on Flickr):
And the smoothing set to Medium, giving pages a more OS X like feel:
It’s understandable, and even laudable, that Apple made the move to make Safari follow the conventions of the native operating system. But for a Mac user stuck using Windows for a good chunk of each day, it feels like a step back.
Chrome
Since Chrome is not yet available for OS X, maybe a lot of Mac users don’t realize how much it feels like Apple just copied Chrome item by item. But when I put Chrome and Safari side by side on Windows, I was really struck with an impression that it seemed like Apple was the one doing the copying for once, rather than the other way around.
For example, some of the icons seem taken directly from Chrome. These two shots show the similarities.
Chrome:
Safari:
Add to this the similar features like the Top Sites and the new placement of the tab bar and it appears like Apple is following Google’s lead. That’s not to say the changes are bad, it’s just weird to see Apple apparently mimicking someone else.
After a day of usage on both operating systems, my overall impression is that the changes are good. On OS X, Safari’s interface is still slick and polished and the changes will not be that hard to get used to. The speed improvements alone are enough reason to use the new version.
And let’s remember this is still a beta. The following weeks will probably see the browser improve even more. And if someone is challenging Apple, that’s a great development in my mind.
- I certainly complain about Firefox on OS X enough in this regard [↩]
