Safari browser for Windows in public beta

Published by Stephen | Filed under Digital Internet

Apple have today launched the public beta version of their Mac browser, Safari, for the Windows platform. This will add further competition to the big two, Internet Explorer and Firefox, who are currently dominating the browser market. It is hard to pin down the exact market share for each browser, but statistics suggest Internet Explorer has a 78% (approx) market share whilst Firefox has about 14%, with other browsers sharing the remaining 8%. Safari being the most popular amongst these other browsers due to extensive use of Apple computers. It looks like Apple would like to exploit the popularity of itunes with this timely release!

We have downloaded the beta version, installed it and given it a test drive today. Our first impressions are excellent. There is a noticeable difference in the rendering time of a webpage between Safari and Internet Explorer. We tried it on the BBC website following the same links in each browser at a time. The page instantly appeared in Safari, whilst Internet Explorer took a little longer.

itunes users will instantly recognise the grey metallic interface Apple use on the Safari browser as it is exactly the same as itunes!

Personally, I find this a little bland, although the neutral grey colour helps to emphasise the page content. You can customise the toolbar to your requirements by opening ‘Customize Toolbar’ in the ‘view’ menu and dragging the icons you require onto the toolbar. Bizarrely, the default setting does not include the ‘home’ icon. Quite often during any browser session I will return to my homepage so the ‘home’ icon was the first I added. The only other icon I added was ’stop/reload’. I decided to leave ‘print’, ‘text size’ and ‘autofill’ off for now.

Upon installation Safari imported my bookmarks from Internet Explorer, Netscape and Firefox and stored these neatly in clearly identifiable folders. The browser comes loaded with a few other bookmarks of interest which can easily be edited.

We won’t be moving away from Firefox just yet, but Safari could become a powerful player in the browser market, especially if they introduce extensions a la Firefox.