Brief Hands-On Report--Apple released Safari 3 Public Beta for Mac and Windows XP/Vista
Apple's speed claim, based on the industry standard iBench tests, is that Safari 3 renders web pages up to twice as fast as Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Mozilla's Firefox 2. In his keynote address, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said Apple is doing this to gain market share among all personal computer platforms since Safari is the fastest growing Web browser out there. Safari holds a 5% market share while Firefox is at 15%, IE is at 78% and all others are at 2%. So Safari 3 joins iTunes and QuickTime as Windows-compatible software.
We downloaded Safari 3 Public Beta and installed it on our 15" MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo running Mac OS X 10.4.9 and Windows Vista Ultimate with Parallels 3.0, our Mac mini Core Duo running Mac OS X 10.4.9, a PowerMac G4 Cube running Mac OS X 10.4.9 and a Shape Actius ultraportable running Windows XP SP2. The downloads went fine on the three computers and the Parallels virtual machine. On the Macs running Mac OS X, installing Safari 3 PB replaced Safari 2.x so Apple must be pretty confident that Safari 3 runs well. There is, however, an uninstaller included with the Mac version of Safari 3 PB so that one can go back to Safari 2.x, albeit via a relatively tortuous route.
Installation on a Mac requires a restart so we suggest closing all applications before installing Safari 3 PB just to be safe. It may also be a good idea to temporarily delete Safari from your account's startup items. Finally, if you have in the past gotten the gray screen fans of death on a restart, it may be a good idea to disconnect all peripheral devices, including an external monitor for a 'Book. We had a problem with our Mac mini after the restart with many startup items selected. Safari 3 PB froze and eventually the entire system froze up. Another restart fixed it. Also, we did not disconnect all devices from our MacBook Pro and got the gray screen fans of death on restart just like we did with the last security update. Shutting down our Macbook Pro and removing all devices resulted in a normal startup. Each subsequent restart of both the Mac mini and MacBook Pro was normal. We had no problems installing Safari 3 PB on our PowerMac G4 Cube.
Installing Safari 3 PB on Parallels 3.0 with Windows Vista Ultimate and the Sharp notebook running Windows XP SP2 also installed QuickTime, Bonjour and Apple Software Update for Windows. No problems were encountered during installation on either Windows setup. Apple makes great Windows software!
We didn't time anything but Safari 3 PB is perceptibly faster than Firefox 2.0.0.4 and Internet Explorer 7 on all installations. It also appears to be faster than Safari 2.0.4 on the Macs.
In hours of surfing, including several sites for banking, making payments and travel reservations, we ran into no issues. [Bill Fox
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