Safari 3.1: Almost there but not yet

Been a couple of weeks since Apple release its Safari 3.1 version browser for Windows. 

I got a chance today to pull it up on my laptop and play around for a couple of hours. A remarkable improvement over the previous versions, Safari is finally set to compete with the real big players in the browser wars. Itz going to be long battle but - especially with IE still hogging more than 70% of the market share in the browser wars. 

The Goods

- Most Web-Compliant browser ever: The biggest strength of Safari 3.1 is this. It is compliant with most of the browsing web-standards. The ACID test is known to be the authoratative standard when it comes to determining how compliant browsers are. Although no browser so far has passed the test (a score of 100/100), Safari 3.1 leads the pack with an impressive 75 followed by a distant 31 (by Firefox) and a meagre 12 (by IE). 

- Memory - a no-hogger: When it comes to memory usage, Safari is very competitive with other browsers like Firefox and Opera (Of-course everyone knows IE is a big big memory hogger).

- Performance: Though the start-up might not be the fastest (well, the only thing that IE can gloat of), Safari is impressive when it comes to rendering speed and overall performance of the browser. 

- The Search feature is nicey-nicey. So are the bookmarks.

The Bads

- Safari does not support some core standards like ActiveX which is increasingly used in large number of websites.

- Safari has its own font rendering (similar to Mac display) and this makes the websites to look very different sometimes (different on the bad side). I went to my own blog, only to realize how horrible it looked!!! It was just impossible to read my blog!!!

- Not much support for customizations and add-ons - but only a matter of time till it arrives.

- The Title bars and Toolbars look a bit hazy and drowsy - could have been a lil brighter.

The last word

The 3.1 version is a signification move by Apple and successfully pitches Safari as the third competitor in the browser war. Safari performs great in terms of compliance, performance and memory. However a few niggles here and there, some of which could be dealbreakers, lead to the final verdict - Almost there but not yet.