Windows Safari Fails to Impress

So after hearing that Jobs’ usual black-turtleneck didn’t seem to impress the world as much as it usually does, I figured I’d check out the only noteworthy thing mentioned: Safari on Windows.

Unlike many other people, I wasn’t checking it out to see “the world’s best browser” on Windows, rather, I was checking it out to see how much worse Apple managed to make the world’s second-worst mainstream browser. You see, Safari 2 doesn’t support a lot of standards, it’s slow at JavaScript, it doesn’t have many features, and it just doesn’t impress. Safari 3 is, well, the same thing only with faster JavaScript (though it seems to delay before updating the interface…) and the ability to resize textareas.

So I downloaded Safari 3 on my Mac first. After I was done with the mandatory reboot I started up Safari. Wait, was this still 2? Maybe 3 installed somewhere else. Apple > About Safari. Hmm…it’s version 3. Yeah…that’s right…I couldn’t even tell that it was a new version. Everything is the same…except that it seems a bit faster and you can drag tabs around. This is supposedly the Firefox killer?

Alright, time to try it on Windows. No reboot needed…cool. I started it up and my jaw dropped. My jaw dropped at the hideousness of it. Like usual, Apple refused to use a Windows title bar…which already kills some functionality. They also failed to make it look anything like Safari on the Mac. The text is blurry, the corners and edges of the window are choppy and pixelated…I honestly feel like I’m looking at a low quality screenshot of a web page in Safari.

Did I mention that it fails to run a lot of DOM manipulating JavaScript in Windows that it does properly in Mac OS X? This is going to be a development nightmare. I for one refuse to support the world’s second worst browser on Windows.

It’s really that bad.

So here I sit, waiting for the battle to ensue. The battle that stages every competent person in the computing world against those we refer to as Mac fanboys.