I've been meaning to try out Safari 3 for the last week, but only got around to it today. The Apple site claims that Safari is twice as fast as IE7 and Firefox. Something which I don't believe is true at all.

It was easy to install, but their claim that it loads faster than any other browser is very wrong. It took about twice as long to load on my system than both FF2 and IE7. I figured it would just be because it was the first run, so I kept trying, but each time I tried, it took just as long to start. But of course, that's not really a big problem for me as once my browser is open, it tends to stay open until my computer gets turned off (which is a very rare event).

The interface is just as you would expect from Apple, in the same style as iTunes. Easy to navigate and pretty intuitive, so there's no problems there. I'm not a fan of the brushed metal look though, but I'm sure there's some tool out there that will allow you to change that.

The claim that the pages load twice as fast is perhaps an overstatement, however I will admit that they do load faster. At least for the sites I visited. I also like the smooth style fonts it uses to render the page, which is a noticeable difference from IE or FF.

CSS compliance is always something I look for in a browser, and Safari stands up very well. It's no better or worse than FF or Opera, so that's good. We all know what IE is like for standards, so I'm not even going to go there.

It's got all the features you would expect like tabbed browsing, RSS integration and Google search.

However, despite all this good, there is also some bad. Not being an Open Source browser like FF, is going to hurt it. The reason I like FF so much is because of the ability to make extensions and themes as you want, and I have several extensions which I simply could not live without (such as Chris Pederick's Web Developer Extension). The other annoying thing is that Safari seems to like my CPU.. so much so that it insists on using 95% of it, and likes to use more memory than Half Life, averaging at around 200Mb. I tried several times to use Safari today, and after roughly 5 minutes, the CPU usage would shoot up and not come back down. This is a serious problem and is the sole reason I won't be using Safari other than for testing.

Obviously though, this is just the Beta, so it isn't going to be perfect. It's certainly a browser I will be keeping my eye on (if only for the lovely smooth fonts). As people who know me well will know, I'm not a big fan of Apple, I've never owned a Mac and I never will, but I will admit when I'm wrong, and if the final release fixes these issues, then I may just become a Safari user.

I wouldn't hold you breath though.

You can download a copy of the Safari 3 Beta from the Apple website here.