Apple Safari 3 Beta review

Safari 3 Beta is the first version of Apple's browser available for Windows.

It looks very much like its Mac counterpart, with its rounded scroll bars and bulbous drop-down lists. There's some wasted space at the top of the screen that could have been used to display more of a webpage, but the various controls and toolbars are tidy and compact. Text is rendered using anti-aliasing to soften curved lines, but we found that this diminishes legibility. On the upside images are anti-aliased, too, which helps avoid blocky artefacts when they are resized to fit the screen or because of shoddy web design.

Safari isn't short of smart features. The best one is Inline Find, which searches for text on a page, updating as you type and darkening the page so that all the highlighted word matches are clearly identified. We like the Private Browsing mode, which allows anonymous web browsing without having to clear the browsing history afterwards, and also the ability to resize text-entry boxes.

Sadly, this beta release has a few annoying habits that make it frustrating to use. Clicking the Address or Search bar doesn't highlight the existing text, so typing won't delete the previous entry automatically. Triple-clicking is the easiest workaround. The mouse wheel scrolls through pages more slowly than in other browsers. There's no facility to resize pages for printing, and although there are various options for controlling the behaviour of tabs none of them makes pop-up links open automatically in a new tab rather than a new window.

Apple claims Safari is much quicker than its competitors for launching and rendering HTML and JavaScript pages, but this was rarely our experience. It was marginally the fastest to launch but tended to be slower at loading pages, sometimes by a significant margin. Memory usage was the highest of the four browsers.

Safari has some positive attributes, but sadly its weaknesses in this beta release are more noticeable.