Apple WWDC Impressions and Safari 3.0 on Windows

Was it just me or did the reality distortion field seem just little less this year? Don’t get me wrong there were numerous really interesting features of OSX 10.5 Leopard that I just can’t wait to try out but nothing really jumped out as a huge earth shattering announcement. New games, iPhone development and lots of neat eye candy on OSX made up the majority of the keynote with Safari on Windows is perhaps the most interesting item to come out of this year’s event. So in an effort to beat the crowds I managed to snag a copy right away (as soon as Steve made the announcement) and here are my impressions of Apple’s first effort at a Windows web browser.

Like past Stevenotes everyone was all excited for the latest Mac hardware or some other big announcement (like the switch to Intel processors…) but this year things were decidedly more subdued. With no major hardware announcements and the iPhone anticipation running very high Steve served up some rather unexecpted items, of which the announcement of a public beta for Safari on the Windows platform really caught my eye. Like many Mac users I often use Safari as a secondary browser under OSX but Firefox is my weapon of choice on the Windows platform. I won’t try to compare the two just yet, but here are my initial impressions of Safari so far….(about 30 minutes of useing it to surf and write this post!):

First off, I love the interface. On Mac Safari looks just “normal” but on Windows it really looks cool. The interface is almost identical to the Mac version with some minor (as expected) changes to accomodate the Windows platform. First thing I noticed was the speed. This browswer is FAST. Steve was not kidding, I was able to pull up sites like cnet and CNN just as fast, and in most cases faster than Firefox. Compared to IE 7 it was no contest, Safari is faster in pulling the site up and in scrolling pages with lots of dynamic content such as Flash animations and AJAX scripts.

Speed aside, if you have used the Mac version of Safari then you will be right at home with the interface on the Windows version. Preferences are basicly the same as the Mac version and the bookmark import seemed to work ok as well. Stability seems good, but I did run into several pages that gave me an error which seemed to disappear on a refresh.

Bottom line: So far I like it, but several things still seem to need work. I still don’t get the full toolbar in WordPress (Firefox does this very nicely) and I did not see a quick way to pull down my .Mac bookmarks (something I expected to be able to do right away…).

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