What's the best beta? IE 8 vs Opera 9.5 vs Safari vs Firefox 3

By Nate Lanxon on 17 March 2008, 11:47am

7Pages

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

Apple Safari 3 for Windows, beta 1
What's new?
Apple has released Safari for Windows mainly to aid the Windows-based development of Web apps for the iPhone, which is a smart move. But it's not a mind-blowing browser compared to Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.

It's simple and elegant, much like everything Apple produces. For this reason it's a good choice for technophobes and, thanks to its good resource management, lower-specced systems. the small load it places on RAM and CPU is, in the heavy world of IE and FF, a feature by default. It's also very quick to load pages, and in our experience the fastest to render them.

It also has an extremely attractive in-line page search function -- Safari darkens the entire Web page being searched and highlights each instance of the word being searched for. Okay, it's not as ground-breaking as automated crash recovery, but if you, er, search for words, it could be helpful.

How it compares
It's clean, it's fast and it just works. It's a good choice for people taking the first step into cyberspace, thanks to its simple operation. It's uncluttered and will make for great early experiences on the Web. But after a few months of getting used to it, even grandparents will enjoy the move to Firefox or Internet Explorer. How much will change before it leaves beta remains to be seen, but it's a cute underdog in the Windows world for the moment.

Update: Apple has now released Safari 3.1 for both Mac and Windows users.