While pundits have been lamenting the fact that Apple's "software update" program on Windows is now pushing Safari 3.1 to users, we thought we'd check out Safari 3.1 to find out if Apple has made any real progress on the Windows version of this browser. After all, it's about the software, right?

We put the Safari 3 beta on Windows through the wringer last summer, and we weren't too terribly impressed. The problems were significant, such that we'd have a hard time recommending the browser to any Windows user. As of last summer, Firefox was still the Windows browser of choice here at Ars. Have things improved for Safari? Wow, have they.

Compliance and memory usage: tops

Safari 3.1 is the first non-beta release of Safari for Windows. Along with the Mac version, 3.1 brings support for CSS Web fonts and animations, and it improves existing support for SVG and HTML 5. There are also a handful of performance and stability improvements rolled into the release.

Standards compliance is impressive. Safari 3.1 scores a 75 on Acid 3, compared with a 53 on Firefox 2.0.0.12, a 40 on Opera, and a paltry 12 on IE7 (I only looked at official releases, not betas; Safari on the Mac also scores a 75). Apart from sites using ActiveX and other browser-specific tech (like WM DRM), I had no trouble using sites in my normal browsing rotation, either. I had no trouble accessing American Express, Gmail, Citbank, Yahoo Mail, Digg, etc.

Compliance without stability is pointless, however. Fortunately, Safari 3.1 for Windows is now a stable, usable web browser. We couldn't say that about Safari on Windows before, but now that we've been testing it for a few days, we can tell you this: it's a night and day difference compared to the beta we saw last summer. I've had one crash in two days, and others in the lab report similar results (and there is a building consensus that the problem is caused by Flash). That puts it on the same stability level as the other major Windows browsers that we put through the gauntlet.

Memory usage is good, too. Safari uses about the same amount of memory as Firefox, pre-memory problems. That is, Safari and Firefox have similar memory footprints at startup, but after you use both for several hours, they start to diverge. Firefox's notorious problems with memory "leaks" are to blame, so Safari ends up using 25 to 50 percent less memory, keeping it from getting sluggish and unstable. This is something we expect to see greatly improved with Firefox 3.0.

Update: several Firefox advocates have written in to tell me that the browser I have been using for years now (Firefox) doesn't actually have any memory problems, and that extensions cause them all. That's funny, because I tested without any extensions, and still had problems. There's a reason why memory fixes are a big part of Firefox 3. Call them leaks, call them what you will: Firefox does have a memory problem, and it's not solely related to caching.

A very fast Safari

Safari is indeed quite speedy. Start time for Safari is fast, but not lightning fast. Unsurprisingly, IE is the fastest browser to start on my Windows Vista test machine by a margin of two seconds; Safari and Firefox are about the same when loaded without extensions (Firefox is slowed somewhat by the 10 extensions I have installed during normal usage, but even then, not enough for me to care). HTML rendering speeds are very quick, too. I wouldn't say that the speed is dramatically different to the extent that I'd switch on those merits alone. Sure, the difference Apple claims looks dramatic, but our testing isn't bearing this out. We'll have a lot more to say on that when we do our complete next-gen browser review.

JavaScript performance is supposed to be one of Safari's strong points, and we have found that to be true on Windows. Safari is very fast, subjectively faster than IE and about as fast as Firefox, perhaps a bit speedier.

A few problems yet

We still find it annoying that there's no "new tab" button. Control-T remains the quickest way to open a new blank tab (but you can also double click on the tab bar to get a new tab). Also, we ran into problems trying to add certain buttons to the toolbar. Doing so would consistently fail, but a restart fixed this. I can live with Control-T and the few bugs that will be fixed soon. Apple has bigger fish to fry, though (like fonts), if it wants to accomplish something with this browser on Windows.





Fonts are still a problem. In fact, for me, the fonts are a deal-breaker. Safari 3.1 for Windows continues to use the Mac OS X font anti-aliasing approach rather than the native font anti-aliasing system in Windows (ClearType). The result is text that is often fuzzy, particularly smaller text. Sometimes small text looks bold when it isn't. Setting Safari to "light" anti-aliasing produced the best results for me, but the text was still inferior to what one would see in IE or Firefox on Windows.

I know some readers are going to e-mail me and extol the ways in which Safari's font rendering encapsulates the ephemeral origins of the written word or some other such nonsense, but it comes down to a basic point: all of the anti-aliased text on Windows is rendered using ClearType. When your app uses a different scheme, it looks broken because it looks different.

Apple needs to fix this, because the company is clearly gunning for market share on Windows. Whereas I once thought that Apple's only interest in releasing Safari on Windows was to get developers interested in WebKit and, eventually, the iPhone SDK, I now think Apple is actually pushing to make this a truly competitive Windows browser. Case in point: Apple fixed it so that you can resize the window by grabbing any part of the Window: top, bottom, left side, etc. When 3.0 beta came out, it behaved like the Mac version, only allowing you to resize from the bottom-right corner. Apple heard the pleas. The Macintosh manufacturer wants Windows browser market share, and both Microsoft and Mozilla should be concerned now that Safari 3.1 shows that Apple isn't interested in half-assed efforts.

In the end, I'll be sticking with Firefox, because it's what's familiar to me, has better extensions, and I am very excited about the 3.0 betas. We'll be paying much more attention to Safari now that it's clear that Apple is serious about making this a quality download for Windows, however. It's now a real contender, which it wasn't previously.