I waited for over 1 month and decided to give it another try with the latest beta version of Safari for Windows. Still no luck. Frequent crashes and no proxy support. Perhaps they are focused on other things. Anyway, I hope they can get it to work because I think everyone should be pushing towards offering a cross-platform, standards-based, browser.

When Apple announced that it had released the Safari for Windows beta product, I was excited to try it out and to see how well the browser actually performed. I am a convert to Firefox from IE and was interested in evaluating the speed and other improvements Apple claims for its browser.

Unfortunately, I never had a real chance to test the software because it is so unstable and buggy that barely a page can be viewed without causing a crash. Click on any of the screenshots to see a larger version.

Proxy Problems with Safari

I am behind a firewall with a proxy server, so immediately Safari asked me to log in to the proxy server. I enter my data and whoops...it crashes. OK, let me see if I can adjust the proxy settings in Preferences. Menu-> Edit-> Preferences-> Advanced...OK, I see Proxy Settings, but wait, the option is disabled and will not let me change anything. By the way, the ? Help icon in the preferences box does not do anything either.

Well, let me just open up a local page on my computer. Menu-> File-> Open File...Why is Safari asking me to enter proxy setting for a local file?...Whoops another crash.

Safari Bookmarks not accesible

If I cannot navigate in the browser, let me see what else I can do. How about checking out the bookmark capabilities. Click on the Bookmarks icon...wait, another crash.

Safari Text Fuzzy

For those lucky enough to see actual content rendered by Safari for windows, there are multiple problems with the way it renders and displays text. Apparently, some of this relates to which set of fonts Safari uses (Apple vs. Windows' versions of font types like Lucida Grande). Digital Inspiration has more information on this bug and offers some possible workarounds.

Buggy code for to meet a PR Goal

Apple again has released a completely bug-ridden piece of software pre-maturely so they could make a PR announcement. This time it was announcing Safari for Windows Beta at its WWDC. They always need something to announce at these conferences and they also need to quite the complaints developers have had about the openness of the iPhone to outside developers. I actually, like the idea and concept of Safari for Windows, but they pushed this product into users hands way too early before the product was even remotely respectable. Less than 1 year ago, they put out an "upgrade" to iTunes which was akin to calling the changes people go through in 28 days later an "upgrade". More recently, they have had problems with iTunes Plus. Maybe if SteveO was a little less focused on stock options and keeping the keynote machine going, Apple could return to releasing high-quality code. Hopefully, when the supposed iTunes Movie Rental store opens later this year, it will work at least OK.