Cormac mentions that Safari beta 3 is available for download on OSX and Windows XP!
I just grabbed a copy and have tried it out on a couple of sites. Its rendering engine is fast, but will it live up to the claims?
According to Apple it:
loads pages up to 2 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2.
It also ships with Bonjour, which is an Apple networking tool.
I’ll have to try it out at work for a couple of days to see how well it handles 15 or more tabs simultaneously. If it can render pages faster that’s one thing, but what’s its memory footprint going to be like?
The only way to really find out is to try it I guess
Certainly the new version for MacOS seems to be a GREAT improvement over the original; in particular, Javascript is faster and seems more compatible.
In my (limited) experience, Safari freezes up and crashes a lot. Besides, I can’t live without my Firefox Browser Gestures extension. Smart tactic by Apple, though — they’ve got nothing to lose!
I don’t know where Apple got the 2x faster claim from , but I found it very very slow – both to startup and to load pages.
That and the Bonjour service crippled my machine (even before it kept asking if I wanted iTunes – NO NO NO!)
Still , when the pages do load it looks great. So I’m going to be shallow and keep it after all.
I’m pretty certain that the 2x faster claim is mostly for the Mac version, which really does seem to be extremely fast. Your Javascript probably IS faster, by that doesn’t make that much of a difference for most sites. This Windows version sounds like they might have been a bit hasty in releasing it…