After seeing Scott Hanselman's experience with Safari, I thought I'd share mine:
The good:
- Did not make it the default browser automatically (didn't even ask me if that's what I wanted when I ran it). Nice...
- While usually a problem with Apple, it seems that (if you downloaded just the browser and not Quicktime bundle and de-selected the options in the installer) that all you get in the browser...not magic services added...good news.
- Private Browsing (allowing you to go to pages but no history or auto-fill is supported) is an interesting idea...not that I would have a need for such a thing ;)
The bad:
- They are using their own font smoothing and it looks fuzzy to me, maybe i'd get used to it, but I doubt it:
<click picture for full size view>
- I don't find it faster (Scott does, but IE7 seems faster).
- The bookmarks implementation (taking over the entire screen) is just annoying...perhaps there is a way of changing it but I didn't dig too deep to find out.
- As with all Apple apps, they don't behave like windows apps. My particular annoyance is that with their application maximized my 'auto-hide' start bar doesn't work. This means they are drawing to the edge of the screen instead of following the Windows design guidelines.
- Integrated Search bar only seems to support Yahoo and Google. While I use Google usually, i'd like to see a more open approach like MS did for their integrated search box.
- Seems to be missing zoom facility that I like in IE7.
- Autocomplete on the address bar is perplexing...they actually found old URL's that I have never typed on this machine (maybe there is a bookmark or something with it or they are getting it from somewhere mystical...made me very nervous).
- RSS Feed support is mixed in with Bookmarks and is confusing to me. I don't like any browser's implementation yet so this isn't as much a problem with Safari as it is with all browsers so far.
I found the browser quite unstable too, I had a total of six crashes in the 1/2 hour I browsed with it. Too bad, more competition in the browser area is usually a good thing (except if you're a web developer ;)
