Decaflon

I have Safari for Windows, but I only use it for design checking. I don't like the way it renders fonts and colors. But otherwise it's a decent browser.

I'm not sure about the spellcheck thing though - I have Firefox and mine spell checks for me on text areas and whatnot.

I second most of what lalindsey said. I don't know why it is Safari's font just renders incredibly ugly fonts--maybe it's not using ClearType? Beyond that I don't really see much reason to use Safari, Firefox does everything you suggest as good or better (though I don't have a Mighty Mouse).

It uses Apple's font modelling, hence the bolder looking fonts. It's just a different school of thought and you wither love it or loathe it. See the comparison below if you've no idea what we're talking about:

I don't like safari on a much more fundamental level. I think it's ugly. The borders are too thin, the scroll-bars don't clique in with the rest of the system. I also hate that I can't resize it from any border:

And middle click didn't do anything. I'm on linux now (I was on Windows when I last tested Safari) and I'm yet to map the middle click to all apps, so I can't tell you if that's changed.

Middle click works in OS X version of safari... no mapping needed, odd that it's broken in the ports.

Glad to hear it, I might go back to Safari now that the new version is in my hands. I switched from Safari to Camino about a year ago but the new Safari appears to be a bit faster.

I have Safari for Windows, but I only use it for design checking. I don't like the way it renders fonts and colors. But otherwise it's a decent browser.

I think that is the one thing that I truly adore about Safari on Windows, is that the manner in which it renders fonts is so much more legible. The problem is that the proxy server support is not as robust as Firefox so on the corporate network at work it does not function properly. But at home, for those times I need to use Windows, I find Safari to be blindingly fast to load and render pages.

@Oli - you can resize the window from any side now ;)

That was also one of the small gripes that was "fixed" in this version.

@jark - it also has better proxy support (supposedly)

Frankly, I think Safari on Windows is hideous. It's beautiful - and my primary browser - on OS X, but it just looks so out-of-place on a PC (especially the awkward menu bar spacing, and other odd design decisions).

I haven't had a chance to check it out in much detail on my XP machine, as I hardly use the thing anymore. But since the arrival of Leopard, I've been using Safari simply because it works really well. You can also enable the Debug menu, giving you access to lots of developer tools (if that's your fancy) -- including WebKit's Web Inspector.

I'd really like to take it for a test drive in XP soon, but I can understand how many Windows users will be put off by the complete aesthetic differences.

'm currently waiting for a stable version of Safari for Windows for quite some time, and I hoped that v3.0.4 would deliver more stability, above all. I'd like to try something different than Firefox, especially if it can deliverbetter performance with a smaller memory usage, and Safari seems on the right track.

The problem is that for now it doesn't seem quite stable yet! Sometimes it just crashes on certain URLs, e.g.:

http://sinatra.rubyforge.org/
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2007-November/000106.html

Did anyone experience the same problem?

The browser just crashes when I try to navigate to those URLs (and a few others, it seems).

Frankly, I think Safari on Windows is hideous. It's beautiful - and my primary browser - on OS X, but it just looks so out-of-place on a PC (especially the awkward menu bar spacing, and other odd design decisions).

I completely agree with your sentiments about Safari as a Windows application. It definitely looks horribly out of place because the window looks almost identical to an OS X window but running on Windows, just like iTunes.

Though I understand where Apple is coming from in designing Safari the way they did.

@jark & @thame:

To an extent you're right: iTunes and Safari look out of place in Windows, unless, of course, you use a theming kit like Flyakite OS X to make Windows look more like a Mac... ;-)

@jark & @h3rald:

I too understand Apple's desire to maintain their brand's UI style across platforms, but I think they could have done it more subtly and more effectively. Forcing interaction paradigms and design styles on users is not the way to do it.

You know I always thought safari on PC just made everything else look bad :)

@h3rald - it didn't crash on either one of those sites, nor on any other site so far.

As for their choice to try to mimic the OS X look in Windows. I understand that it does create a paradigm when faced against the rest of the interface, but then again, the idea of bringing this Apple applications to Windows is to introduce the users to the Mac OS X experience.

But then again, a lot of popular programs on Windows "ignore" Windows' GUI, like for example: Winamp, Windows Media Player, Trillian, Windows Live Messenger, etc. And a couple of those are popular Microsoft-developed applications.

I prefer the look Windows' iTunes has compared to Windows' Safari. But then again, my biggest gripe with its design is the fact that the menu is underneath the title, though I understand the problems that would emerge if they placed the menu next to the website's title.

But then again, a lot of popular programs on Windows "ignore" Windows' GUI, like for example: Winamp, Windows Media Player, Trillian, Windows Live Messenger, etc. And a couple of those are popular Microsoft-developed applications.

At least those applications made an effort to ensure the appearance of their default skins is decent. Additionally, those applications make no attempt to look like regular applications whereas Safari on Windows is most certainly trying to appear like a real windowed application (as opposed to a skinned one), just an OS X one as opposed to Windows.

Whether you like the default skins of those applications or not depends on the user's taste obviously, thus debating the look of each application would be rather silly.

I don't entirely agree with your opinion regarding the "no attempt to look like regular applications" statement but in the case of Trillian, I can understand where you're coming from.

one thing why safari can never beat firefox is plugins,firefox has millions of them,there are very few of them in firefox