06.17
I tried the Safari v3 beta on several different machines this past week. On my work PC (Windows XP Pro) it actually works like a charm. No crashes or anything like that.
On my Powerbook (A 12″ G4 (last generation before the MacBooks – so it is maxed out as far as Powerbooks go))… on the other hand..
It ran BUT everything seemed to have slowed down. Menus dropped down slower. Text entry in some programs was slower. Firefox slowed down to almost unusable. Overall… not encouraging (Good thing it is a beta)
I uninstalled it on my Powerbook. The system seems a bit faster now. Except Firefox (2.0). That stayed slow after the uninstall. The uninstall must not have uninstalled everything.
Haven’t tried it on my mini (under either Mac OSX or XP)
I should say, just to be honest, that I’ve always felt Firefox on a Mac was excruciatingly slow. Speed wise, on my Macs, Safari has always been faster subjectively. Not a big deal. I prefer the uncluttered looked of Safari anyway. I don’t need/want “Kitchen Sink Software.” I just want a web browser that works. And I have yet needed to visit a web site that doesn’t work with Safari.
Sure, Firefox has that wonderful extension thing going for it… but I don’t need most of that. (And I don’t understand the Safari hatred in some quarters. And I don’t care that some people claim Firefox is better. So let’s not go there. Okay? I come from the “Simple is good” school of user interface design. Safari fits my philosophy better than anything else at this point.)
I do use Firefox almost exclusively at work. But that’s because I don’t have much choice other than IE. (I use both because I work on a Web 1.0 application/web interface to one of our applications (Meaning it has very little Javascript and only uses CSS for font colors, and other color things.) And no, I can’t rewrite it as a Web 2.0 kind of thing. I can’t change the interface – much.)
