Safari 3.0.1 Review

I've been using Safari and Firefox for the past week, and each one has its merits. Click read for the full review.

Safari does what it needs to do and does it fast. It does boot up faster than Firefox, and it seems to load pages fairly quickly.

Safari also passes the Acid2 test—something that Firefox can't quite do yet (I believe the new rendering engine for FF3.0 can supposedly pass it). Apple's WebKit rendering doohickey does a really nice job, and I'm a big fan of the smoothing that Safari does with the screen text. (I wish there was an application that smooths all text in XP like it is on a Mac.)

So, Safari renders pages well and does it quickly, what's not to love? First and foremost, I don't have mouse gestures! Opera has them natively, Firefox has several extensions for them—they're fantastic! Also, my fourth button on my mouse doesn't make me go back in Safari like it does in IE and FF. I guess that's because those confangled Apple mice don't have but one or two buttons. Five is way to confusing.

Another qualm I have is that Safari forces the Mac chrome on its users (much like iTunes does). For a company who prides itself on UI beauty and usability, you'd think that they'd develop a product that integrated seamlessly with whatever OS you're using.

The main reasons to use Safari over Firefox are speed and rendering. There are a few extras (like Safari's RSS reader and in-line search tool) that make people go "Ooh, Safari," and even more that have people go "You know, there's a Firefox Add-on that does that" (even though the more bloat you add to your Firefox install, the slower it gets), I don't think it's enough to use Safari as anything more than a novelty.

Once Safari allows add-ons, adds spell checking and changes the wacky keyboard shortcuts, Firefox is going to be my browser of choice.

Didn't like my review? Check out Noah's over at psoplayer.com!