Test Driving Apple's SAFARI on XP Machine - Questions?

I installed the SAFARI browser last night and am taking it for a test drive since IE7 was giving me so many issues.

So far the speed of the page loading is tremendous, the only issue that I have found so far is the fact that I cannot view any of the premium videos, the player doesn't load.

I must need a plug in or something.

Use this thread to ask me questions or to comment on the performance of this browser if you are running SAFARI on a windows pc.

I tried SAFARI when it was first available a while back and was extremely impressed with its speed.

Overall It is an impressive browser but it had quite a few other problems that I became aware of at the time.

Like you, I had trouble loading videos and certain websites and I wasn't too happy with the way the bookmarks were displayed or handled.

It is far superior than IE7, slightly better than Firefox (for performance) yet lacks the manipulation that Firefox gives.

I'm sure as safari develops further it will gain strength and will perform much better than now.

I might just have to re-install it and test it for a while longer

I guess alot of people thought this SAFARI for Windows deal was shelved so this is a fairly new beta that is having the kinks worked out.

I clicked allow pop-ups in preferences to see if this was causing the premium video player loading problem - no luck.

If I get it figured out I will make a post on the solution. IF anyone knows the solution, please post it here.

Hi Jack,

Have you installed these?

Plugins

reply to post by makeitso


Thanks for the link makeitso, yes I have all of those plugins installed, but no premium video (won't load), or ATS podcast player due to a (mime) issue.

I can still use IE7 for those though, other than those two issues it is running smoothly (crosses fingers) much quicker than IE7, I haven't used Firefox so I can't compare in regards to that browser.

It is a clean looking browser, the buttons normally found to the right on IE are on the left in Safari which takes a little while to get used to, it does automatically import your favorites/bookmarks which is nice.

I saw your thread and went ahead and installed it on my Vista machine...

It sure is fast and fully functional for me..

However.. (Theres always a however..LOL)

I don't like the "Gray" bland look and I can't figure out how to change the "Theme" or even if you can...

Semper

reply to post by semperfortis


I think after they work all the issues, there is a forum over at APPLE support that is actively working issues which was a nice surprise, they might work on other themes

I like the simple look though, I use ATS light as well, yes I like like plain

More importantly I like the speed....

If I get some updates to make the other problems go away I will post them here so others who might like to try SAFARI can use this as a reference for plugins, links etc.

last time i tried it was when it was first made available to the public. like it's mac equivalent, i found it to be a little inadequate. maybe they've improved it, but i find a lot of pages don't quite render properly in safari in general. i use firefox in mac OS and in windows.

Well, at least this time I can use it.

I don't know why the previous version was unusable on my computer, crashing when I least expected.

A CSS speed test said that it was fastest than my other browsers (Firefox, IE7 and Opera), but I don't see any real difference in the speed of the page load and rendering, maybe a faster connections would make a difference, I will try it from the hard disk.

It as one very annoying feature, the font smoothing. Even set to the minimum, the text is too blurry, it looks like I am looking at the screen without my glasses on. It should have a way of disabling that feature. Also, it looses the changes to the font smoothing, I have to change it every time I open it.

It also has another annoying thing, that Opera also uses, the "Refresh" button is the same as the "Stop", so we may hit the stop at the moment it stops and changes to the refresh, reloading the page.

It takes up too much memory with just the blank page:
IE7 - 6MB
Firefox - 15MB
Opera - 19MB
Safari - 20MB

After loading ATS' home page they grew to:
IE7 - 21MB
Firefox - 22MB
Opera - 30MB
Safari - 40MB

With the seven pages that I had open in Opera opened on all browsers, these were the values:
Firefox - 56MB
Opera - 57MB
IE7 - 74MB
Safari - 76MB

It uses the selected page to show the bookmarks, I did not noticed and closed the bookmarks, only then did I noticed that the page that I was seeing had disappeared.

The bookmarks have a childish bug, I wonder how nobody noticed it, when we choose "Show all bookmarks" it changes the page we are viewing to that of the bookmarks and the menu item changes to "Hide all bookmarks", but when we close the page the menu keeps the text, so if we want to see the bookmarks we must choose "Hide all bookmarks" to see them.

I will have a look at some pages to see if it works as it should.