Surfin' Safari?

Browser choice is becoming a big deal on both PCs and Macs. The question is – which one do I choose?

The MacBook came with Apple’s Safari Web browser already installed so I haven’t spent any time looking at the alternatives. The latest update I have just downloaded has brought me the new Safari 4, while co-incidentally my PC has finally decided to download IE8. I see Firefox 3.5 is out soon, so it’s all change on the browser front.

I gather there are (or were) some security weaknesses in Safari that weren’t shared by Firefox, so a lot of Mac users have opted for the latter. I am not sure whether Safari 4 has resolved these issues, but security has not been highlighted in any reviews I have read, so I am assuming they have.

The main thing that Mac users seem to be excited about is the speed of Safari 4. Up against Firefox it clocks up much faster handling of basic Web elements such as XHTML, CSS and JavaScript. It is also top of the class when it comes to meeting the latest Acid3 and CSS3 web standards, so there’s almost no chance of coming across a Web page that it can’t render properly. This comes at a price in terms of program size though – 80MB to be precise, which is almost twice the size of Firefox 3, although unless you’re short of disk space this is hardly an issue.

If you use the ‘Cover Flow’ view in iTunes to browse though your music collection you’ll like the Top Sites window in Safari 4. This fills your browser home page with a curved matrix of snapshots from your most recently or most frequently visited sites, allowing you to jump back into the site of your choice. Gimmicky? I suppose so, but it looks cool, which is what the Mac is all about.

The only negative comment I have read, which I have to agree with, is that Apple has for some reason decided to dump the old page loading progress bar and replace it with a rotating button next to the URL in the address bar. This means you have no idea how long a page is going to take to open, which seems to be inexplicably dumb.

Surprisingly this is not just a Mac issue – Safari 4 was downloaded 11 million times within the first three days following its release, and of those 6 million downloads were the Windows version! I’m running it on my PC and I’m tempted to make it the default browser.