Going on a Safari

So earlier today Safari 3 Beta 3 was released to the online community. Not only will Safari 3 be a long overdue update for the Mac but it will also be the first version of Apple's gem on Microsoft Windows, Vista and XP. For me as a web developer, and I'm sure other web developers will agree, this is a good thing. No longer will developers that use MS Windows as their primary OS have to borrow a mate's Mac or use an online screen grabber just to see if their site works ok in Safari. This is great news especially if you are developing a lot of AJAX and YUI based interface's which can be time consuming to debug on two different machines. So being an excited geek that I am I decided to download this beta on to the laptop I am currently using. Needless to say the installation was smooth, although having to choose if I wanted quicktime, is this really necessary???, and if i wanted to use Bonjour! was a minor niggle to me. After a quick install I fired up Safari and I must say it loaded very quickly, and I was presented with a very familiar Safari interface that trys to make your machine look more like a Mac than a PC. What struck me most was the anti-aliasing all over the GUI. I knew this is how Mac's worked but I never figured it would port to XP that well. Vista I expected would work but not XP. I can happily say it works amazingly well. In fact I'm writing this post in it, input fields look round and sexy, none of my text looks jagged its all smooth and yummy! Any how I decided to check a few of my favourite site's to see if I could spot any issues, especially JavaScript ones, but so far I haven't spotted any. Although I must admit I have only visited big mainstream sites that you would expect to work anyway. So far every site I have loaded has done so in a very quick manner and can i just say it again, anti-aliasing. Obviously a quick half an hour play doesn't really constitute a full tech grilling, and as it's only beta 3 I wouldn't recommend putting it on a machine which you wouldn't want harmed, but so far so good. A few month's ago Thom Shannon blogged about having to get a Mac or use screen grabbers to test site's, it now looks that this isn't the case. Just goto http://apple.com ;) I look forward to playing with this beta over the next few weeks and you never know, maybe Safari could still my heart and become my general web browser when I'm not developing. You never know ;)