Safari 3 Public Beta review

In last month's edition of Computer Buyer we tested every web browser currently available for Windows.

We concluded that Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7, the latest version of the standard software that most PC owners are using, was easily outperformed by several other free browsers, including Firefox and our Best Buy, Opera. At the time, we didn't compare Apple's Safari web browser because it was only available for Macintosh computers, running under the Mac OS X operating system.

Just after our browser group test was printed, however, Apple surprised the world by announcinga new version of Safari for Windows users, describing it as 'the fastest web browser on any platform'.We immediately put it to the test to see how it fared against the other contenders.

Safari 3 for Windows is currently classified as a beta test product, so it's acknowledged that some bugs may still be present. It's available to download together with Apple's QuickTime software (which is well worth having on your PC, since it's required by some applications and websites to display audio and video content) or on its own. Safari alone is a mere 8MB download that'll take no time at all on a broadband connection, and installing the software is easy. It's hardly surprising that a million PC users downloaded it within 48 hours of its launch.

Quick sharp

Safari launches quickly, although not noticeably more quickly than Firefox or Opera. The main window is instantly recognisable as an Apple product thanks to the metallic grey look of its menu bars. These are almost identical to the ones used in iTunes, another Apple software product that's available for Windows (and very popular with PC users) as well as the Mac. Unusually, the borders down the sides and across the bottom of the web page being displayed are very thin, making the program look neat and modern compared to its rivals.

Safari's user interface has a few unusual features for a web browser. There's no Home button, for one thing, although this can quickly be changed by going to View, Customize Toolbar, where you can drag on the extra buttons you want. An extra button provided by default shows a picture of an ant, and can be clicked to report any bugs to the developers.

Our tests didn't convince us that Apple's speed claims were entirely justified. Safari is certainly no slouch, but we didn't find it exceptionally fast compared to other Windows web browsers. We opened a selection of pages using Firefox, Opera and Safari and found that both Firefox and Opera were frequently slightly faster. Safari did render pages well, though, and we didn't notice any errors when laying out pages that used complicated CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) formatting.

Safari has a few quirks of its own. We immediately noticed that text in web pages looked unusual. A little investigation revealed that Safari smoothes text itself rather than relying on Windows to do it. You can reduce the smoothing, but even at its lowest setting we found the effect off-putting. Others disagree, though, and it may just be something you get used to. Safari's thin borders look attravailable, but we soon chose to enable the status bar at the bottom of the window so that we could see where links would send us before clicking them.

We did come across a few glitches, including one occasion where the auto-complete feature wouldn't let us type in a web address. Fortunately, closing the browser and trying again fixed the problem. Such issues should be fixed when the final version of Safari is made available, but in the meantime they're an occasional pain.