Big news today as Steve Jobs announced that Safari (the default Mac browser) is now available on Windows. Yet another Apple announcement that I didn't see coming. At first I was surprised, but I can't say I cared all that much. I don't use Windows much anymore except to test my projects in IE7, and I already have Safari on my Mac of course. Then as I started reading people's reactions to the news, I started having more opinions.

I understand that we live in an internet age and people with little to no information will spout off just to watch themselves type (not me of course), but some of the things I hear are so entertaining. The best place to find a good range of comments is on Digg (see the post yourself). There were a few that stood out and represented many voices.

I'd call it an Alpha, instead of Beta. It behaved very erratically while I've used it.

I wonder if this person knows the meaning of Alpha vs Beta. Most Alphas mean they're adding features, while Betas are typically feature-complete and trying to work on bugs. Hence erratic behavior, because Beta means pre-release, which this most certainly is. Look back at the IE7 betas or Firefox betas. People love to get "testing" software and complain up and down. The purpose of releasing these publicly is to let "enthusiasts" and "developers" test the software and report bugs, not post blogs about how crappy the software is. I'll say it again, this is PRE release software.

Regardless of that, this will really be a good way to see how "Secure" Mac products really are...

Uh oh, here we go. Ammunition for the wanna be programmer to spout misinformation and believe he has fact backing him up. God forbid a virus or malware will infect someone through Safari on Windows - then of course it must be the browser. Software can't be more secure than the OS it runs on ladies and gentlemen. While Firefox is inherently better off than IE from the mere lack of ActiveX holes, it's still less secure than its Mac counterpart because of the Windows APIs it runs on. A lot of the security holes are "related" to the OS, so let's not make sweeping judgements about the Mac OS based on software Apple ports to Windows, shall we?

(User tells Apple to...) Design and code to Windows standards for interfaces.

Why? I mean they have the three basic Window buttons along the top in the same place, so now why would Apple want to just make a Windows app and give the user no taste of what life may be like on a Mac? I think the point here is to let Windows users get a feel for what a Mac app could be like. Whether they like it or not is subjective, but the point is not to make an app that looks like IE with a different engine inside. Let's lock Firefox out of being skinnable why don't we?

I have 3 basic tabs open, one being this page and no other digg pages yet it's using close to 200MB's of RAM... for what?!?

The perfect example of someone thinking they know something while really being completely in the dark. The KHTML engine focuses on speed. To do that, it caches everything it can into RAM. This means that it has a large memory footprint and performs amazingly well. It's a tradeoff, but not a big one. Just because an app uses a lot of RAM doesn't make it evil. I guarantee that it's not using any RAM that other apps are trying to use. This is where something called "memory management" comes into play. If you have nothing else competing for that RAM, then why not eat it up so it can perform well? This is by design. But if you've got some idea stuck in your head telling you that a good app has a tiny memory footprint, then by all means move on. I hear Lynx calling your name. By the way, Firefox has similar priorities, hence it using a lot of memory while in use and this is what makes these browsers perform better than IE on the whole.

I have Vista running via Prallels and so I decided to install the Safari beta there to try it out. I'll say one thing, it launches and loads pages notably faster than IE and Firefox. So at least those claims seem to be accurate. I'm curious to see how Safari turns out when it goes gold. Right now I see features in each browser that I like better than the others, so there's no clear winner on Windows or Mac. I also downloaded Safari 3.0 Beta for the Mac and it's "much" faster than the old version. Odd thing though... no unified interface. Isn't that odd? The Windows version gets it, but not the Mac one? I know, just beta, but so is the Windows version. Oh well, I'll just let SafariStand do the unifying and enjoy the engine improvements. Oh, and the inline search is very well done. It's the little things.

Carry on.