Performance overview

When Safari for Windows beta was released recently, one of the most common questions that many computer users had was, “why?”  Well, there are at least a couple of reasons that Apple may have made the browser available on Windows.  The first is for avid Mac users that are, for one reason or another, stuck on a Windows PC.  This is most likely due to work, but there are a few other scenarios that may force a Mac fan to be stranded with just a Windows computer.  The second is for website developers.  When a web publisher makes his or her website live, he or she must fully test the site in all popular browsers to ensure that it renders and functions correctly.  Apple’s Safari for Windows allows for testing on that browser without having to hunt down a Mac user.

Safari offers many of the options that are pretty much par for the course with modern browsers and many of them originated with Firefox or Mozilla.  Safari has an integrated RSS reader much like the one that is offered in Internet Explorer and Firefox 2.  Additionally, like Internet Explorer, Safari now offers tabbed browsing, a feature that Firefox has offered ever since Firefox 1. 

In spite of its buggy release, Safari does have several functions that are not available elsewhere that are worth mentioning.  The first of these is called SnapBack.  SnapBack enables the user to jump all the way back to the initial page visited on a website or to the initial search results page.  This can be particularly useful when browsing sites that have inadequate navigation or when your search turned into more of an endeavor than you had originally thought.

Safari also has a neat feature integrated with the “Find” function.  When the “find” function is executed on most browsers, the word that is searched for is highlighted in the text.  Safari goes a step further and dims the text surrounding the searched term.  While this is certainly a neat feature, it probably wont be enough to make up for the awkward manner in which text searches are conducted in Safari, as it is the only popular browser that does not open links with the “enter” key during searches.

Finally, Safari enables Windows users to do a trick that they have probably never been able to do before.  Safari lets the user resize text boxes on web pages, in spite of the default settings that the publisher set on the boxes.  While this is definitely an innovating “cool” feature, it probably will not make up for the lack of security and added options that Safari lacks that other browsers such as Firefox 2 has readily available.