Friday, November 23, 2007

Safari testing on windows:



By Shubham
Now before I begin I must confess that I am a die hard Firefox fan. I 
some times wish that even my iPhone had firefox!!! It actually took a
lot of convincing in the first place for me to give safari a proper
try. A friend of mine from the the firefox fan club had recently
swiched to a mac and he was claiming safari to be a much better
experience.
After testing for a few days some of the features that immidiately
caught my attention were:
- blazing fast speed. I mean really really fast. Its draws up pages
faster than any other thing out there.
- autocompletes web addresses as we type.
- font smoothening makes the web a treat for the eyes
- very easy to setup and configure as fewer intelligent opions
- spell and grammar check. A feature every modern browser should have.
- a very slick interface. The rolling out and the zooming out windows
are a pleasure to have.

Now some of the things that I am generally used to and am them missing
here
- my scrapbook on orkut is missing.(apparently its a bug in the orkut
website code)
- download manger does not show the percentage downloaded in the title
bar like firefox. So there is no way to know if a download has started
after clicking on a link. In firefox the window label generally
highlights if something new is happening.
- no integrated 3rd party download manager that can be installed like
a plugin at least not for the windows version.
- in the bookmarks page shifting folders around is a pain. Especially
in the highest level folder tree. Also what's the folder called
bookmarks menu for? (update: I think I got it. It seems be the list of
bookmarks in the dropdown bookmarks menu)
- lacks the feature to open files directly with their default program
instead of downloading it first. I use torrents a lot and earlier
firefox would automatically open the torrent file from my browser
window in my favourote torrent client.
- no suggestions in the search box unlike firefox which gives a drop
down list of suggestions.
- also no default option to pick a search engine apart from google or
yahoo. In firefox I have all kinds of search engines installed IMDB,
Wikipedia and more.
- also no option to force pages that are supposed to be opened in a
new window to open in a new tab. Firefox has this option and you don't
end up openinig a new window accidently.

All in all safari is a excellent browser but it is a better choice on
a mac than on a PC because on a mac you can customize it a whole lot
better using apple scripts and the plugins available.

I hope you liked my review. Will be writing another one for the new
firefox 3Beta. Please leave a comment.


Sent from my iPhone

3 comments:

GP said...

Firefox Rules! but yes apple's been eye candy..

Hari said...

Autofill is available in Firefox too! Go to about:config and set browser.urlbar.autoFill to True. Done. So are many other options..

Hari said...

And, what about gmail, Safari can not handle Gmail! Searching also simple in firefox.i