You may have heard that Apple is bringing the Safari web browser to the Windows platform.  In fact, you can download the beta now.  I wanted to see how compatible my own website is, since Safari is not a browser I’ve ever tested.  Unfortunately, proxy support seems to be broken right now.  Whenever I try to go to a website, I get prompted for my name and password to get through the proxy (this is on my PC at work).  After entering this information, Safari immediately crashes.  This is beta code, so I won’t fault them for having bugs.  I do, however, question the validity of this chart:

From my own experience, this is completely backwards.  Opera is much faster than IE, which is faster than Firefox (when I say IE, I mean IE 6, whereas the chart says IE 7; maybe IE 7 is slower).  I’m not sure what kind of HTML they used to conduct this test, but it must have been much more complex than your typical webpage, in some way that made Safari look good.  Of course, I still use Firefox, the browser that feels slowest to me, because 1) I need my precious extensions, 2) IE is teh suck, 3) Opera cheats with overzealous caching, 4) the speed difference is not really significant, and 5) Opera doesn’t support ctrl+enter, which I rely on to type URLs.

The other thing I noticed in my brief time with Safari is the font smoothing technique, which must have required a lot of work to port over.  I’m not going to get into a discussion of whether it is better than the Windows technique or not; if you’re interested, Joel Spolsky has already done a pretty decent job of covering that topic on his excellent blog.  The problem I had is that my monitor at work is a little unusual in that its sub-pixels are aligned backwards (BGR instead of RGB).  You can fix font rendering in Windows to account for this, but I couldn’t find any such option in Safari.  For an illustration of the problem look at this image:

If you are on a CRT monitor, both probably look OK to you.  If you are on an LCD monitor, one of them probably looks significantly easier to read.  For most people it is the text on the left; for me, it is the text on the right.  This means that the text in Safari will be really difficult for me to read.  Again, they are in beta right now; they might fix this issue by the time the final version ships.

My screen at home is normal, and I don’t go through a proxy there, so maybe I will actually get to try it out tonight.