I'm not a fan of Apple, mostly because of my first job after college. I had to lay out newspaper pages in Adobe PageMaker on a green iMac G3 with a hockey puck mouse. The computer crashed all the time, had a ton of weird idiosyncrasies, and the lack of a right mouse button drove me crazy. So I wasn't expecting much from the Safari 4.0 for PC beta, released today. I was pleasantly surprised.
Once I downloaded the beta from the Apple site, installation was fast and easy. Like most installers these days, the Safari wizard tried to give me some software I didn't want. In this case, it wanted to install the totally unnecessary Bonjour for Windows and schedule automatic updates, but I unchecked those options and no weird stuff seems to have been installed. Safari does use the Apple Software Update application, which has been criticized for pushing unwanted applications, but it isn't scheduled to run automatically. Just be careful to uncheck unwanted boxes when you run Apple Software Update.
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My first impression of Safari was that it's a lot like Google Chrome. The tabs are at the top of the window, and Safari opens new tabs with a 12-panel view of your most visited sites. Like Chrome Safari's default appearance is very spare, leaving most of your screen to display sites. I prefer Safari's appearance over Chrome's, however. Safari has a professional look that blends in well with Windows Vista.
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Browsing Performance
Safari's site boasts that the browser is fast, and I agree. I didn't run performance benchmarks, but pages like Gmail and Google Maps worked very quickly and script-heavy pages with lots of Flash ads never bogged it down. It also handled multiple tabs playing high quality YouTube videos without slowing down. Safari didn't crash or hang at all for the time I used it, and I didn't notice any bugs.