Apple announced on Monday that they have brought out a beta of Safari 3 for Windows. “Hmmm, that sounds interesting”, I thought, especially with its claims of speed increases in displaying web pages up to 2 times faster than other browsers. I downloaded and installed Safari with no problems. And when I launched it for the first time it ran smoothly, and indeed it was much quicker than Firefox and Internet Explorer. It even had less of a demand on my precious system resources. So I changed my default browser to Safari 3 and used it for the rest of the night, mightily impressed.

Tuesday dawned, and I slowly realised that Safari was gonna cause me problems:

• The back button on the side of my mouse would not work in Safari
• Also, to go back I had to press CTRL + [ (not Backspace as it is in Firefox and IE)
• When I tried to compose a post in Wordpress the toolbar which allows me to add formatting and embed links would not display. I could edit the text, but there was indication if this was the text of the post or the raw HTML.
• I missed some of my Firefox extensions

So I admitted defeat and switched back to Firefox. And I was dissappointed. I was beginning to warm to Safari. And the speed improvements were obvious and certainly appreciated. I didn’t mind having three browsers on my system. I’d already decided how I was going to use them:

• Safari - this was going to be my general browser, the browser I used when I had lots of other things open (I usually have Outlook, a few spreadsheets, Word docs, Live Messenger, iTunes and more running). The speed and reduced draw on resources would have made this ideal.
• Firefox - this was going to be my power browser, when I was going to do a heavy browser session. With its advanced features, excellent support for most things on the web and powerful extensions, it could be tailored to what I need, although it is rather RAM hungry.
• Internet Explorer - I use IE when I have to, when Firefox can’t/won’t display pages correctly, or when developing web pages. Its resource usage sits between Safari and Firefox, but I just prefer Firefox nowadays.

I still have all three browsers installed, but until Apple addresses the issues I have with Safari, it won’t be used too often. Firefox is, once again, my default browser, and will be for the foreseeable future. I accept that Safari 3 is only in Beta, so it may change so watch this space.

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