Safari

have any of you used safari on windows yet. I'm using it right now and it works well. It doesn't work well with GTalk but find with gmail.It makes my PC look so mac I love it.

 

IT took me a while but once I got all my bookmarks going it works really well. It's so much more pretty than firefox.

 

You should be aware that Safari has some glaring security flaws. I don't have a link to this... but I was hearing a story about some hacking competition, where people were challenged to hack into a laptop (their choice, either Windows or OSX) in the shortest amount of time possible. The winning team chose OSX with Safari as their exploit of choice. They stated that the same security leak existed on the PC version of Safari, but they could get in to the Mac faster.
I want to make it clear that this was an organized legitimate contest. The laptops were supplied with the intent of having people try to hack into them, and the winning group got to keep the laptop they hacked.

When people tell you that Macs are less vulnerable to viruses or what-have-you, you need to understand that that's because Macs have traditionally been far less popular and thus are less attractive targets. If you can choose to either have your exploit work on a handful of systems or on what is essentially the standard platform of the entire world, you choose the large user base as your target.


Anyway, about Safari, I tested it out because I'd used it on a Mac laptop I was toying with before and was impressed, specifically with how it handled image loading. I'm just sick and tired of web pages that load up and then keep changing size as they load new images and have to shift text around to fit them in. Once upon a time it was standard practice to feed image sizes to the web browser so it could load up spaces for the images before they were loaded, but that seems to have been abandoned. Safari seemed to handle that better, not just loading up the images fast but rendering the page fast without having to constantly shuffle things around as new elements are loaded in.


I didn't really see that benefit on the PC version, though. Testing suggests that it may be a bit faster, for example I used Google Maps as a very graphics intensive application. It's possible that the map graphics were loading more reliably. In FireFox I often have to scroll around to get it to wake up and finish downloading map sections. But on the other hand, the zooming effect is missing. If I zoom in or out it just redraws the entire map with the new resolution settings, this may sound petty but I found it to be fairly disorienting. When you change resolutions the entire look of the map changes so it can be hard to keep track of the spot you were looking at.

In the end the real motivating factor for my decision to stick with FireFox is probably that I'm used to it and how it works and Safari has failed to give me any reason to want to switch. It looks a little different and fresh and that's interesting, I may continue to experiment with it from time to time, but I think inertia will keep me with Firefox for now, with occasional excursions into Opera for some specialized applications like online comic viewing where FF's lack of high quality page zooming becomes a liability. That's especially an issue on my laptop which has an insanely high resolution screen, which leads to web images normally being displayed rather small. When you're trying to read a web comic that's just annoying. FireFox 3 is supposed to have a high quality image scaling system, but for now it appears that FF2 just can't handle that well so that's why I went to Opera for it.

Oh, the other thing that's keeping me with FireFox is the add on system. For example I've got a Google customizer plugin that, among other things, blocks the way that Google tracks users and keeps LIFETIME RECORDS of their searches. I'm just not happy with that, and as such I've stayed away from Google with my Safari experimentation. Also I've got an Exif viewer that lets me view the Exif data for images, that's quite useful on this site. There's even a plugin that can speed up FF's network usage, including a level of acceleration that apparently breaks the rules that web browsers are supposed to follow that will speed up web browsing but can put extra loads on servers and annoy admins.

The Google addon is the only one that I rely on regularly, but it's a flexible system that I'd hate to give up.

 

IE, really? I can't stand IE it is one of... no, the worst browser I have ever used. Sorry if you like it but I can't stand it the menu section of the browser takes up like one third of the screen. Okay rant over.

 

You can actually turn off the tracking. I've never tried it but I've heard that google lets you shut it off.