Sunday, June 17, 2007

First Look at Safari for Windows

Over the weekend I downloaded and setup Windows Safari on a Pentium 3 HT system running Windows XP with 2GB of RAM. After checking out a few sites, I did notice that pages tended to load faster than in other browsers. I figured I would use the browser for a couple of weeks, check out some of its features, and then make a decision if I liked it better than FireFox or SeaMonkey, which are the browsers I like most (I chucked Internet Explorer a long time ago due to the CPU resources it uses compared to FireFox and SeaMonkey).

Then I attempted to access my company's e-commerce system to check on new orders. This of course is a secure URL, and I was not able to get to it in Safari. After entering in my login information, Safari would freeze, and an Microsoft error box came up which asked if I wanted to report the error to Microsoft. I attempted to login several times, but experienced the problem each time. I then decided to try to login to the same secure system on a G4 desktop with Safari, and I had no trouble. So evidently the problem is not within Safari itself, but in Safari's interaction with Windows. I did report the bug to Apple, and thought the ability to report bugs along with screen shots was a great feature. Obviously I could not take a screen shot of the actual freeze, but that would be a useful tool for other problems.

Being that I must access this secure area on a semi-regular basis, I would not be able to make a permanent switch to Safari until this was resolved. As there are many other businesses that use this same e-commerce program, I would guess that it is an error that would be worthy of fixing. Having said all of this, I was very impressed at the page load speeds in Safari, it definitely is better than Internet Explorer, and in the limited browsing I did, it gave FireFox and SeaMonkey a run for their money.

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