Nice Work If You Can Get It

Apple just announced Safari for Windows yesterday, and it has probably gotten a number of downloads since being posted to Slashdot. I decided to give it a try. I found that there are some cool things, such as the fact that it passes the Acid2 test. However, some people have already claimed to find vulnerabilities (I’m not terribly surprised).

One thing I have noticed already is that when opening about 8 tabs, my memory usage started to climb pretty quickly. In fact, I think it is less memory efficient than Firefox 2. (Used over 360mb RAM on Windows XP SP2 while having gmail, google maps, google reader, Anandtech, and Amazon.com pages up at the same time for about 2 hours.) That little issue combined with the fact that not all of my mouse functions seem to work in the browser (scroll button, back button) I have decided to keep using Firefox as my primary browser for now.
Undoubtedly we’ll see more in depth reviews of the browser soon. I’m keeping in mind that this is still a beta, and the little “bug” icon is still prominently part of the toolbar. It will still do us good to see what the browser does better than the competition, and what needs work. For now I see that memory consumption could be a big deal over time.

Current Mood:  restless