Safari Browser for Windows - First Look

As Zen posted about here, Apple is releasing a version of their Safari browser in a Windows flavor. It got off to a bit of a rocky start, with a hacker - Thor Larholm - finding serious security flaws just two hours after the Beta 3 release for Windows. Because of this I wasn't going to download the browser, but Apple have fixed three of the more serious problems; thus, I thought I'd give it a whirl.

I downloaded and installed Safari, no problem. If you've ever used Apples iTunes program, then you'll be familiar with the look of the browser - grey. Anyway, as this is just a first look, I would ask that any users of Safari (Apple users I suppose) correct me if I make any mistakes.
Below are the pros and cons I found while using it -

Pros

• The rendering of text in the browser is very nice. Fonts look very smooth and easy to read.
• The resizing of text boxes. This means if you're typing in a text blog - posting a comment on a blog - you can actually grab the lower right-hand corner of the text box and make it as big as you like. Handy for tbr.cc which has quite a small area in which to add comments ;)

Cons

• Clicking in the address bar doesn't select the address already in there. This is REALLY annoying - you either have to swipe the cursor across the address in order to select it and delete it, or press alt/d to select it.
• Windows key/M doesn't minimize the browser as it does every other Windows program.
• I was a little disappointed that one of the features Safari users brag about, the ability to email an entire webpage, is not working in the Windows version. This works in Internet Explorer or in Firefox (you have to have the Amazing Webpage Emailer plugin).
• Lack of plugins ala Firefox; Firefox has a plethora of pinatas plugins available from their homepage that users have written and some of which (such as mouse gestures) I can't live without. Safari doesn't yet have plugins like this beyond the Quicktime and Flash viewers and such - not that I could find (Apple users feel free to correct me).
  

Apple has a little graph on their Safari site which purports to show how blazingly fast the browser is. I tried several browsers seeing how fast it took to load the content-heavy site download.com and there was very little difference between them. So, for now, I'm not that impressed.

Hopefully it will get better though.

ps, you would have had to have seen 'The Three Amigos' movie to get the 'pinatas' bit :)