Snow Leopard: Safari 4.0 Reviewed
Since I loaded the newest OS from Apple, 10.6 Snow Leopard, I have been on a quest to really give Safari a chance. I have not been a fan of Safari in the past. Ever since the birth of Firefox, I have been a strong supporter of that cross-platform browser.
But let’s talk about Safari 4.0 and what I find to be different from previous versions. First, speed. The fact sheets say it’s faster than anything out there. In fact, every time a new Safari comes out, Steve Jobs stands on the stage and claims how much faster Safari is than any other browser. And this may be true, but truth be told, I’m not sitting here with a stop watch timing. I am going to review from pure perception. After all, or satisfaction with a product is how we perceive it to work and not what some fact sheet says.
First of all, it doesn’t feel any faster. The programmers should be proud of the milliseconds they have gained. To me, pages seem to load just as fast, especially when you are browsing for fun in the background while still doing your work. So congrats on making it faster on paper.
Second, forms. Any Mac user knows about this. When you are filling out an online form on a mac and you get to a drop down menu you have to grab the mouse and click and select what you want with the mouse. On Windows, you just tab over to the drop down menu for your state and hit the first letter of your state on your keyboard till your state appears. When filling out forms, I much prefer to keep my hands on the keyboard than having to grab for the mouse. Well, this is something that Safari and Apple have finally gotten right.You no longer have to move your hand to the mouse (come on Firefox team, why haven’t you figured this out yet?).
On the surface for the average user, that is all you are going to really notice as being different. One thing that I was hoping would be different of how Safari handles pages that are designed for Internet Explorer. At work, we use a system for logging tickets that will only work with IE and I was really hoping that this version of Safari was going to correct that issue, but I was sadly mistaken.
To sum up my opinion on Safari 4.0 … I’m going back to Firefox 3.0. Sorry Apple, but you just don’t have the best web browser.
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