No more asking friends for screenshots or waiting for the one Mac in the office to be free. Apple have released a Windows version of Safari. Still in beta, from using it all day I have yet to encounter any major issues. I did encounter a rather odd one. As a test, I decided to write this post using Safari. In the paragraph below which talks about performance. It failed to save anything beyond the word “fastest”. It failed to even copy beyond the word fastest. In the end I had to type it all out again if Firefox. Like I said, a little bit odd.

The big question is whether we can rely on its rendering engine to layout pages in exactly the same way as they would be on a Mac. During my, admittedly brief, testing phase, I had my Mac running alongside and did not come across any differences between the two. Which you would expect since they both use the same layout engine engine, KHTML/WebKit.

Apple seem to be making a big thing about its “Blazing Performance” and go as far as to claim that it is the fastest web browser available. My Firefox installation, like many others Firefox users, has a gazillion plugins and extensions and so it probably isn’t hard to be the fastest. Still, on a fast broadband connection it is hard to make a comparison.

The really really really minor issues are to do with its desktop behaviour. It fails to remember the position and state before being resized so defaults to its pre-set window settings. One thing I do a lot is to minimise all windows to gain access to my desktop icons, for some reason Safari seems to escape my Window-M keystroke. I did say it was minor. :)

Download Safari for Windows

Want to open a desktop application by clicking on a link? This can be achieved by registering your own protocol such as mydesktopapplication://. This guide will show you how.