Spontaneous Monotony

You might remember that a while back I mentioned a new Windows browser based on Safari’s WebKit rendering engine. That didn’t amount to much, but not wanting to be outdone, Apple have released Safari itself for Windows, and it is even worse!.

Most of the Apple software which is available for Windows is actually pretty good. It might lock out features that every other competitor provides for free (Quicktime), or refuse to work with any player other than Apple’s own (iTunes), but what it does do, it generally does well and with a nice user interface.

Safari blows this reputation out of the water. Its page loading is, according to Apple’s publicity pages, the dog’s dangles:

The fastest web browser on any platform, Safari loads pages up to 2 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2.

Whoever wrote that should be careful he doesn’t put his nose near anyone’s eye. Safari is the most pig-slow piece of garbage that I have ever encountered. I’m not talking about complicated sites using lots of Flash or Javascript (I haven’t bothered to install the former, since I won’t be using Safari in its current state), I’m talking about relatively straightforward text-plus-pictures sites like BBC News. That, of course, assumes that it bothers to load the page at all. Often, during the ~5 second page loading time (by which point in any other browser I’ve reached the page and probably clicked a link to another one) the ‘progress bar’ will simply stop for no apparent reason. Sites that are working fine (as attested by IE7, Firefox 2, and Opera whatevernumber) simply fail to load. At all.

This could be down to individual connection foibles - I’m running NOD32’s Imon, and a router with its own firewall in addition to my software firewall. That wouldn’t be a particularly promising start (given that other browsers work in this setup) but it would at least be sort-of excusable for a Beta release. Unfortunately, from the comments at ‘Two a Day’, it seems that I am not alone:

Mac user at home, WinXP at work. Installed the beta at work and crashed when I tried to access Yahoo mail. Seems awfully counter productive to release a beta this unstable to the Windows people.

I never thought I’d say this, but I think that IE6 has finally lost its long-treasured crown of ‘worst Windows web browser ever’. Who would have thought that Apple, king of user-friendliness, could release such utter crap?

Tags: Apple, Computers and Internet, Firefox, IE6, IE7, Opera, Safari, Security, WebKit

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 12th, 2007 at 9:59 am and is filed under Computers and Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.