Apple Safari Review

Posted on April 1, 2008 at 5:48 am

There are so many browsers out there that deciding which is the best is hardly an easy task. Nevertheless, whenever anybody asked me which was the best browser out there, I confidently said Firefox.

I am a great fan of Mozilla’s baby and have been using it since its inception. My bond with Firefox has laughed of the gravest of threats including Opera and Internet Explorer 7. But after that fateful day when I downloaded and installed Safari, I can no longer answer that question without hesitating.

Safari 3 is available for both OS X and Windows for free, and can be downloaded here.

Interface

By rule of thumb, Apple products are supposed to have a great UI. This trend carries on in full force into Safari. Simply put, whatever Firefox or just about any browser does, Safari does better.

Before we delve into any details, this is what Safari looks like.

Minimalist is the word. That makes sense considering the fact that Safari’s tagline is “Focus on the Web, not the Browser”. Overall, Safari’s interface is powerful and intuitive, and it looks great while doing it. Even the downloads windows looks nice and minimalistic.

When I first started using Safari, the only emotion coursing through me was denial. I could not accept that some browser had come waltzing along, only to make me feel as comfortable in five minutes as Firefox had in several months.

Subconsciously, I assumed that it was because Firefox offered lesser features than Firefox.

This was, of course, a completely invalid assumption.

But my first sign of deliverance came when I tried looking up Google for a word. In Firefox, one could select a word and drag it into the built in search box to perform a search for that word. Finally! Some solid proof that Safari was indeed lesser featured than its rival.

So imagine my absolute and complete astonishment when I discovered that Safari indeed had this feature, but had taken it a step further and perfected it. In Safari all you had to do to run a search was right-click on a word, and it the resulting context menu, the very first option would be, “Search with Google”.

It was uncanny. It was almost as if this browser was reading my mind. No selecting, no dragging. Just two clicks. The simplicity is stunning.

To sum it up, Safari has the best interface out there. Period.

Performance

This is one more area than Safari shines. The reason I gave Safari a shot was because there was word going around that it was even faster than Opera. After having used it for a respectable amount of time, I can confidently say that Safari is indeed the fastest browser I have ever used.

If you’re worried about pop-ups, don’t be. Safari blocks them just as effectively as anything else out there.

It also got a perfect 100/100 in the Acid3 test. So no issues whatsoever with performance.

Features

If you go back to the starting of this article, you will notice that I said I would hesitate while deciding on which was the best browser. That is purely because this is the one area that Safari loses out on. Not features as such, but expandability.

Almost every Firefox user uses some plugin or the other to enhance his web experience. Be it Ad-Block Plus or GreaseMonkey. These plugins constitute a very important reason to stick to Firefox. Something else I really wish was there is the “Open last closed tab” feature.

Safari lacks any advanced customization options, unlike Firefox, whose “about:config” page offers enough options to keep even the highest degree of control freaks satisfied. This is not always surprising because Apple has always been a great believer in the “more is less” philosophy.

But I did like the “Private Browsing” feature. It activates a session where no history is stored and downloads are cleared as soon as done. Simply put, anything that happened between the activation and de-activation of Private Browsing is completely invisible.

Conclusion

Safari is undoubtedly one of the best browsers out there. But whether it is the best is up for debate. A “power-user” will find the lack of advanced options jarring, but the average user will hardly notice them missing. Give it a shot, and I’m sure you won’t regret it.

This is a guest post written by Om J. Bathija, a tech enthusiast and blogger.

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Comments

7 Responses to “Apple Safari Review”

Chris Blackwell said on : April 1st, 2008 at 5:57 am

Very good review. Your broke it down nicely and had a lot of accompanying screenshots. I agree that Safari is a very nice browser, but I just can’t seem to give up my FireFox (especially the new FireFox 3 beta 4). I’d love to see your review of IE8 and FireFox 3 when they are released.

Chris said on : April 1st, 2008 at 7:29 am

Re: The right click search with Google

If you double click a word/words in Firefox then right click, there’s an entry for “Search x for _selected words_”. The x is dependent on what search engine is currently selected in your search box. So if you have the search box set to Yahoo, you can search your selection with yahoo by right clicking, as well as dragging to the box.

Dileep said on : April 1st, 2008 at 11:27 am

Hi, Good review on Safari. However, I Firefox 3 is far more better than Safari. Safari has a long way to go. It does not display some sites properly. When using gmail, I noticed that the Tab Title is not updated when a new mail is available.

Finally we, the users are befitted through competitions like these. Now Firefox guys have someone to compete with them.

macboy said on : April 1st, 2008 at 4:16 pm

Nice review. I like Safari because it is minimalist and unexpandable. That’s what makes it stable.

Om said on : April 2nd, 2008 at 9:20 am

Hey guys, thanks for all the comments!

@Chris, I felt that way for a very long time too. But Safari eventually overcame intuition and is currently my primary browser. I will surely review FF3 and IE8 when they are out in the open.

greg said on : January 19th, 2009 at 6:29 am

first thing I noticed is that safari tries to outsmart me…and its stupid. I speak english and live in japan. when i go to facebook (www.facebook.com) it autopopulates the page in japanese (http://ja-jp.facebook.com/) so i cant read anything. I try to change it and it changes itself back. i guess it outsmarted me right into its own non-exisence.

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