Safari for Windows

One of the headlines recently was Apple announcing the release of their Safari browser (version 3 beta) for the Windows platform. While this is mostly due to the fact that 3rd-party application development for the iPhone will be entirely based on Safari, ala web applications, it has the added bonus of allowing people without access to an Apple computer (a group to which I sadly belong) to see how their websites look to Apple users.

After installing it on a Windows XP Virtual PC image, I loaded Safari and performed a few of my normal web browsing tasks. You know, visited my daily news pages, opened a few favorite web sites, checked my email, etc. All-in-all, everything worked the way you would expect it to and the application had a nice, clean interface (even the preferences dialog was easy to navigate and understand). There were some rendering problems, particularly with some AJAX-styled sites I've written with the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions, but nothing that would really be considered a show-stopper. If anything, now that Safari is available to a LOT more developers (like myself), I would guess that the problems I've seen so far will be fixed in short order.

I was surprised that it responded and ran as well as it did (it is a beta after all). Having run the last few version of iTunes and seeing how much of a system/resource hog it was, I figured Safari would perform about the same. Hopefully this is a sign of things to come since Safari is utilizing the newer Cocoa libraries instead of the older Carbon libraries. If this is indeed the cause of the performance boost, I sincerely hope that Apple will rebuild iTunes (and Quicktime) using Cocoa.

As someone who writes software, I know it's not an easy task to undertake, but my only real complaint against iTunes is it's performance on Windows. If it performed at least as well as the competition (or as well as it does natively under Max OS X), it would probably be my default media player. I need something that can navigate 30+ GB of music files and countless video files easily and without getting in my way. Windows Media Player 11 is doing well, but the iTunes interface is usually a little easier to work with.

Time will tell.