I've been playing with the new Safari beta.  On windows, so on my machine at work obviously. (did try with wine but the installer was having none of it, heh)

What do I think of it?  It's a browser.  Another one to add to the growing collection that as a web developer I obviously need to have... (no, really)

I'm slightly suspicious of anything Appley anyway, cos they're rather too fond of over hyped expensive proprietry stuff and mac fanboys are weird and scarily obsessive.  But windows safari seems vaguely the same as mac safari in terms of how it works and rendering and stuff.  No real surprise there.

At work at any given point I've generally got at least two browsers on the go.  Today I decided that I should try to use safari as the 'main' one, to give it a real test.  But it has no webdev toolbar so that didn't entirely happen...

Good points:

• you can resize text boxes. Tiny textareas are one of my pet peeves so this is a very good thing
• um...
  
• it's not IE
  

Bad points:

• double clicking on the tab bar does not spawn a new tab.
• tab close buttons are on the 'wrong' side of the tab
• too obviously not a windows app

That last one is the really annoying thing.  I mean, yeah, it is a mac app... but as far as I'm concerned if you're going to port your software to another OS you could at least try and fit with its behaviours.

All my other windows programs have the same window decorations.  If you change the colour scheme, they all change.  But not Safari - it sits there looking all fake metally and has a different style of close button.  To resize anything else I can just grab any edge and drag - but not safari.  That has to stay all mac-like and only resize with the handle in the bottom right hand corner. grr

This is partly me being petty, but it's one of those little things...  If I'm using windows or linux, I know how everything is going to behave. 
Same with OS X - if I'm using that I'm fine with having to resize using one specific corner only, or having menu bars that aren't attached to the rest of the window.  That's fine, because everything on the screen is the same.  But mixing stuff up is annoying and confusing

tags: geeky