Reading Windows

Alright, I'm not generally known around here as a techie but I was lurking on another forum and came across a thread someone posted on Safari 3. I was a bit excited and more than a little surprised to see that they were beta testing it for Windows as well as for Mac so I decided to head on over to Apple and download it.

I've had the browser for all of oh, I'd say about fifteen or twenty minutes at this point and I have to say I'm not as impressed with it as I hoped I'd be. Thus far I haven't figured out how to force it to actually import all of my favorites from Firefox (as Apple actually said it would do upon opening for the first time), nor have I really had much luck with resetting my homepage. I'm sure there's an easy way to do that but I haven't exactly figured out what that is. And while the browser itself is visually appealing and it does load quite quickly, I just haven't found much of a reason to be impressed with it yet.

Has anyone else actually used Safari 3 yet?

--Jami

I wanted to test Safari but postponed that until whenever when I read in other reviews how insecure and bug-ridden it is. Apparently it crashes a lot and people found close to two dozen critical security flaws so far. On non-US computers it seems to not even start up.
It puzzles me why Apple would throw an obviously unfinished and flawed product on the 'net. If anything, the horrible quality discourages Windows users from switching to Apple.

My theory is that the iPhone is behind it. Because the iPhone will come with (is based on) Safari. This means that

1. most Web developers are Windows users, and they will need a way to check if their stuff works with Safari (and thus the iPhone), and

2. a lot of tech people were less than enthusiastic about Apple's announcement that the iPhone will be 'closed' software-wise, i.e. third-party developers won't be able to write software for the iPhone. However, people will be able to run and create special web applications ('programs' that 'run' in your web browser) for Safari. Again, without Safari for Windows, developers who don't own a Mac wouldn't be able to develop for the iPhone.

So, with the iPhone scheduled to be in stores less than two weeks from now, I figure the guys at Apple just took the latest unstable build and threw it on their 'web server.

(Also, there's quite a bit of talk on Safari at The Register.)

Aah, una bella finestra!

This post was edited by null on Jun 16, 2007.

I'm not leet enough to pick out security flaws and what not with stuff like this but it is good to know that I'm not the only one so far that isn't impressed with Safari 3. The thread I found out about it in was posted by an Apple Fanboy so I wasn't too surprised to find that a lot of comments posted on the thing were favorable to it.

I really haven't researched the iPhone very well, in fact, I don't get too impressed over cell phones of any sort and the idea of a computer hardware/software development company all of a sudden deciding to jump into the telecommunication industry just doesn't sit well with me.

--Jami