Safari 3 Public Beta
Apple released Safari 3 Public Beta a few hours ago. And it runs on Windows too. Time to take a quick look at the new browser. So here are my first impressions.
Testing Safari on Mac OS X
I’m running Mac OS X 10.4.9 on a Dual 2.0 GHz G5. After installing the new beta, I had to restart my machine. Reboot… Log in… Start Safari… I’m starting up Safari, the app imports my bookmarks from Safari 2. And it does nothing at all. My startpage failed to load. When I’m trying to load a page from my bookmarks Safari also doesn’t load the page. And using the Google searchbar also doesn’t work. I’ve sent Apple a bug report. Hope they’ll do something about it.
Another “strange” thing is that my version of Safari 3 still has the brushed metal look, and not the sleek new interface shown in the screenshots at the Apple website. This might be a Leopard only feature but it’s also possible that something went wrong when installing Safari 3.
Uninstalling plugins
I was using the Safari Tidy plugin and this was the thing causing Safari not to start. Now that I got Safari working, it does start up really fast. So there is a good thing to say about the product after all.
Running Safari on Windows
I’m running a virtual copy of Windows XP Professional on my old iMac G3. Since I only use Windows to test websites with IE, I’m do not need a really fast machine for now. However if my iBook G3 dies I’ll buy a MacBook (Pro). So in this first test of Safari on Windows, I’m not expecting superb performance.
Installing took some time (read more than an hour). I’ve used the Safari + Quicktime installer since I did not have a version of QT installed on my Windows machine.
When I started Safari for the first time on Windows It crashed. Second time, the same… Rebooting Windows might do the trick?
Nope. The only thing I see when I start Safari is the bookmarks bar and the word “Google” where the search field should be. And then it crashes.
My thoughts for now
I’m not very impressed with the new Safari. It seems like there is a lot to do for the people at Apple to make it a great product.
I’ll probably uninstall Safari 3 again on my G5 since it doesn’t work that great. Back to Safari 2, for the websurfing moments. I’ll leave it on my Windows machine though. Uninstalling would probably take too much time. I’ll try to test Safari 3 on a few other macs later this week to see if I get the same bugs.
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