I’m using the Safari Web Browser for Windows now on both my Laptop and my Desktop.

All in all, I’m happy with the browser. It’s fast and it’s not prone to the hijacks and trojans that Internet Explorer and, to a lesser extent, Firefox are targetted by. However, it’s not without its bugs.

• There is a memory leak somewhere in the application – a few times I’ve had to kill the process as it gobbles up more and memory until the machine grinds to a halt.
• The Windows Media Player plugin leaves a lot to be desired – number one on the list would be a pause button!
• It has a problem with the tinyMCE WYSIWYG editor that is found in many web applications, including WordPress – because it trashes Safari as soon as it starts the browser simply blocks tinyMCE. The tinyMCE people say it’s a Safari bug and nothing they can do about it.
• Occassionally a link stops being “clickable” (but only occassionally).
• Some websites (my bank’s online banking site being one) refuse to load in Safari because it’s not a “supported browser”.
• There doesn’t appear to be a keyboard shortcut to navigate tabs (I like keyboard shortcuts).
• There doesn’t appear to be an option to open all pop-ups in a new tab instead of new window without holding down control when clicking a link.
• You can’t insert “special” characters using the Alt+ASCII code into textboxes because Safari loses any text after it. Even if you try and do a copy+paste from the browser windows into Notepad it loses the text but bizarrely you can copy special characters from Notepad and it’s fine with those. Go figure.
• You can’t insert an e with an acute accent using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Alt+e (as used in Deja-Vu or Cafe) because Safari has hijacked it for clearing the cache.

I think that’s all my gripes – if anyone from Apple wants to get in touch I’m happy to elaborate on them. So, bearing in mind the above list of irritating bugs why do I keep using Safari?

• As I said above, it’s fast. Much faster than Internet Explorer and despite what the PC magazine’s say, you can tell the difference.
• It’s more secure because producers of scumware haven’t bothered targetting it. Apple’s are pretty tough nuts to crack, especially now they’re built on a proper operating system, and Safari has a smaller market share of the Wintel market (about 5% so Apple claim).
• It makes a very good attempt at CCS2 compliance – better than Internet Explorer and Firefox – and even has a bash at rendering CSS3. For example, most elements have a hover pseudoclass in CSS3 – check this demo out. If you’re using Safari and hover over a menu on the left of the screen it will expand with more options. If you’re using Firefox or Internet Explorer you’ll see a normal link.
• Textboxes on pages can be resized whether they’re coded that way or not. Sure, it messes up the page layout quite often but instead of typing into the 4 or 5 line textbox Blogger comments give you, you can resize it to fill half the page if you want. Small things please small minds I guess but it’s a nice touch.