Safari Browser?

http://www.apple.com/safari/
I'm happier with FireFox than IE. What is the scoop on Safari?

Safari has a fast rendering engine (faster than Firefox/Gecko), a more 'elegant' UI... but that's about it. Safari is a huge memory hog, and some Web2.0 sites like Writely don't support Safari (or didn't used to). It supports some CSS standards better than Firefox (and some worse), but that is mostly only a concern to web developers. I would stick with Firefox.

I use it all the time. I still have Firefox on the machine because every so often I do run into a site that doesn't work, but the google docs stuff that carrot mentions at Writely work just fine with it.

Firefox has the really neat feature of being able to be extended with plugins written in javascript. No other browser does this. It lets you do some really cool stuff internally to companies and such where some special functionality is needed. But nobody on the internet proper uses this for much that is important to me yet. Safari does not do this.

Safari's rendering engine is based on open source stuff, it's really quite nice. The main thing that people get up in arms about is the differences in the text rendering between safari and firefox and IE. I am used to how safari does it and do not find it blurry at all, I find the way that IE does it looks like 1994.

There isn't any reason you shouldn't download it and give it a try. You might find that the style of the interface and the speed of the rendering is to your liking. You wont run into many sites that have a problem with it.

It's great that Writely now works with Safari/Webkit/KHTML. One of the main reasons I switched to a Gecko-based browser (Camino)... I know that both Apple and KDE have been working hard to improve Webkit/KHTML, which is what Safari uses as a rendering engine, and it really shows. I guess Safari/Win32 is worth a shot, but having been with Firefox since it was Phoenix 0.2, I'm kinda biased.

And this is supposed to be helpful to a techno-illiterate?
I am on Dial-up would I be correct that Safari would load pages faster?

carrot said:

It's great that Writely now works with Safari/Webkit/KHTML. One of the main reasons I switched to a Gecko-based browser (Camino)... I know that both Apple and KDE have been working hard to improve Webkit/KHTML, which is what Safari uses as a rendering engine, and it really shows. I guess Safari/Win32 is worth a shot, but having been with Firefox since it was Phoenix 0.2, I'm kinda biased.

Click to expand...

Dunno. I've always thought Opera was the fastest browser, but it is not as friendly or tidy-looking as Firefox. You can customize Opera to look and feel nicer, though. I don't think Safari for Windows is worthwhile yet, because it's still new and kinda buggy. Maybe in a few months?

carrot said:

.......... Maybe in a few months?

Click to expand...

Thanks, I'll hold off----and probably revive this thread

I dont think that on Dialup your choice of browser is going to make much difference at all. The pipe is so slow that just about anything will be able to keep up. YOu might find that one or the other browser started rendering faster than the others and filled in more dynamically as it finished loading. Safari does that for me on very slow sites. Parts become visible one at a time. That might make it feel faster as you could start looking at parts of the page before the whole thing is finished. But you'd need to experiment to see for sure. It used to be that Safari had a fixed timer and if the page hadn't finished loading by the time it expired (just a few seconds) then it would try to render whatever it had in the queue and then re-render when it got more. And you could adjust that timer to make it feel faster, but it wasn't really faster because it didn't finish till the same time, it just rendered earlier. I dont think that timer exists in this version I think it's smart about knowing when it can render something. Still worth a try though.