Filed under: Software, Internet Tools, Beta Beat
Safari on Windows: Your reports
Reader ADM sent us a message and screenshot of his Windows XP PC (Wait a minute...or readers have Windows PC's?!?) running Safari 3 Public Beta. He reports:"...Just downloaded and installed safari...Note the cleartype font smoothing in effect. It's fast but not stunningly fast, so far..."
If you've got a Windows box sitting around like ADM and you're willing to install the Safari Beta, tell us how it goes. What works and what doesn't? What do you like and what could use a little beta-development love? The comments are open.
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 7)
tonybo said 4:07PM on 6-11-2007
incompatible for chinese website~~ lots of characters lost...
Reply
david said 4:12PM on 6-11-2007
On XP, crash when trying to access to the bookmarks ... Display of google search pages is incorrect. Hope Apple will fix that soon.
Reply
Nikke1973 said 4:12PM on 6-11-2007
I have been trying to use safari for windows about 20 minutes and it has crashed 7 times! Not very well Apple:(
Reply
Casey said 4:12PM on 6-11-2007
New "find" function in Safari 3.0. Closer to spotlight in form.
Reply
am said 4:13PM on 6-11-2007
Here's a link to the full-sized screenshot:
http://thousandrobots.com/blog/files/safari.jpg
The address bar seems a little buggy so far. When you start typing a URL and it auto-completes, it doesn't let you click the URL to select it. Not sure if that's a bug or expected behavior, but it feels clunky.
Reply
Kendal said 4:13PM on 6-11-2007
VERY quick and snappy. Finding it faster than FF2 right now, and definitely leaps and bounds faster than Vista.
Reply
Mark (UK) said 4:14PM on 6-11-2007
Very slow. Windows XP SP2, on a slowish laptop.
http://www.metphoto.net/ Mark (UK)
Reply
deevee said 4:14PM on 6-11-2007
complete failure for me
http://www.flickr.com/photos/deeveepix/541214667/
i'll wait till out of beta
Reply
Mo said 4:15PM on 6-11-2007
I'm running Safari 3 Beta on Tiger and Vista. Runs flawlessly so far on both. Safari/Windows appears to be using ATSUI for text rendering, though I've a feeling that Windows' underlying font matching engine isn't quite up to Apple's standards.
Reply
Kendal said 4:15PM on 6-11-2007
Also, for the past hour, it hasn't crashed despite trying to force it to, by running videos, lots of tabs, etc.
Very effective with my memory which is quite lovely :)
And in OSX! OMG! SNAPPY AS HELL! Faster than Camino, even.
Reply
stxhess said 4:17PM on 6-11-2007
It's great. I installed it within moments of it going up, and won't go back to firefox unless some page is completely unreadable (haven't run into yet). Even then, Safari is much nicer looking, and I like being able to drag tabs. I'm not a big RSS user, so I can't comment there, but overall I really like it.
Reply
Kevin said 4:17PM on 6-11-2007
Doesn't play well with Google Desktop sidebar.
Reply
HazKid said 4:17PM on 6-11-2007
Safari 3 on Vista Ultimate:
Font smoothing can be lessened, but not turned off. Text looks incredibly blurry. Vista disables some of Firefox's features, so I have to stick w/IE7 on my vista box.
Safari 3 on Palm OS:
I installed it using my windows emulator on my Tungsten T3. It is absolutely incredible. Easily 10x faster than WebPro or Blazer. I love WebKit!
Safari 3 on Leopard 9A410:
Crashes. Leopard has an earlier biuld of Safari. I'm sure that the public beta is what is used under the WWDC07 leopard Beta.
Safari 3 on Ubuntu:
Haven't tested much, but firefox eems to be better.
Reply
FrankMcBilboWinker said 4:18PM on 6-11-2007
It seems slow now. I do like using it though because I can pretend I'm on my mac just in a crappy Windows Xp environment.
Reply
Doc said 4:20PM on 6-11-2007
works great for me and save me the trouble of installing mac OSx on my pc..since this was the main reason that i was going to do the install today anyways seems great to me saved me about 30 mins in setup time..thanks apple! although it doesn't run that fast IMO, just as fast as it does on my girlfriend mac and just as fast as firefox did..oh well at least i have it on my PC!!!
Reply
michael cysouw said 4:21PM on 6-11-2007
tried the version 3 for the mac, but it didn't work at all... (on a PPC)
Reply
Ernie Kwan said 4:24PM on 6-11-2007
I'm running it both on Windows, and Mac OS X.. and its AMAZING on both of them... very fast, and intuitive, I was pretty upset when Safari was released for Windows (not that I wanted PC users to suffer anymore than they already do) but now I realized what a great move it was... still uncompatible with some sites.. hasn't crashed at all and looks great.
Reply
Oleg said 4:25PM on 6-11-2007
Running it now on XP - not bad. Many sites don't load properly though. But overall impression - very fast.
Reply
Greg said 4:26PM on 6-11-2007
I have installed it on an XP machine @ work. Interesting they have also packed in Bonjour and Apple Software Update into the install (Can also download with quicktime). I think apple is trying to make XP more like OSX to make switching easy.
Reply
Adrian said 4:27PM on 6-11-2007
I'm using Firefox in Windows XP. Safari font smoothing makes text look slightly blurred compared with Firefox (yes,I've tried all three settings), or is that just because I'm used to Firefox Windows font smoothing? Safari has a beautiful interface though. It's a great sales pitch for the Mac GUI, which is, I suppose, what it's there for!
Reply