In case you have not already heard, Apple has released a public beta version of Safari for Windows XP and Vista. I’m not sure this is what Apple wanted to achieve, but it will help many web designers and developers to test their work in Safari without having to buy a Mac computer. That would of course be a little short-sighted decision if Apple did not have something different on his mind.

iPhone, You Phone, Everybody Phones

The main reason for introducing Safari for Windows is bringing iPhone development platform to PC. Since iPhone uses Safari’s rendering engine, developing an application for iPhone is basically developing a web application for Safari using web standards and Ajax. Safari will allow developers to create and test third-party applications that will look and behave exactly like applications built in iPhone. These applications will be able to seamlessly integrate with iPhone’s services and extend its capabilities.

Browser

Browser alone is still a bit raw and needs a lot of polishing. In fact, it really feels more like an early alpha. According to first reactions many users have experienced frequent crashes and hangs. It crashed immediately on both of our Windows XP computers when we tried to add a bookmark or view bookmarks list, which made browsing very uncomfortable and unpleasant. It’s not possible to switch tabs by pressing Ctrl+Tab. Tabbing through links works only after you enable that feature in preferences, but it seems to work fine with form fields. Text in Safari is too anti-aliased and it looks kind of blurred, but I guess it’s just a matter of taste. You can change the font smoothing value from medium to light in browser preferences, but it still looks a bit too smooth. Dual monitor systems are also reported to have problems with Safari. There are a few more bugs related to Safari’s integration with Windows.

Claims about JavaScript performance are a bit stretched. It really depends on the JavaScript benchmark tests used. Safari really was faster than Internet Explorer and Firefox in some tests, but was even slower in others (DHTML JavaScript Benchmark).

Conclusion

I cannot recommend Safari 3.0 beta to average Windows user yet, though non-Mac developers will benefit from it. I’m sure Apple will fix most of the bugs before releasing the final version. All in all, it’s a move in a good direction, though Firefox will undoubtedly be the browser of choice for the majority of web savvy users regardless of the platform or operating system - and rightfully so.