Safari not so goodi

So at last Apple have ported their quirky Safari Web browser to Windows. It is great to get another browser into the market to further promote choice and innovation. Astoundingly Steve Jobs claims that this will trigger another browser war - and that Apple is aiming for the 15% of the market that Mozilla currently holds with Firefox. There would seem to be a more obvious target!

Obviously Apple claim that Safari is "The world's best browser" but this hasn't been backed up by my experience with it. Firstly, just like the horrendous iTunes, it has the ugly gun metal grey header and menu bars which take no account of any Windows theme and so clash with everything else.

But that is just cosmetic so do I have any more substantive criticism? Well Apple claim that it is twice as fast as IE and 1.7 times faster than Firefox - but that hasn't been my experience. It seems about the same. They claim that compelling reasons to move are things like Popup blocking, inline RSS and tabbed browsing. Not really anything new. They also state that "Security" is a reason to love it - perhaps they should have done a bit of testing first to avoid this type of egg on the face.

The biggest problem however, is that it keeps on crashing. Of course a new browser on the scene isn't going to render every page perfectly first time and it is still in Beta testing cycle - but I'm afraid I'm finding that it falls over so often that is is unusable. As my frolleague Darren Adams would say, it is about as stable as Paris Hilton juggling cats on a pogo stick.

Interestingly when I analyze the traffic to mrports.com I can see that 4.63% (2466) of visitors use Safari whilst 8.83% (4698) of visitors are using Macs. Demonstrating that just under half of the Mac users are not using Safari. If these Mac users are rejecting Safari it can't bode well for its invasion of Windows. Less of an Apple, more of a Plum?