Safari: my $0.02

Apple made a new browser available in public beta yesterday. This doesn’t happen every day. There was, naturally, a rush to get it, and then a rush to test it. I think every web designer and blogger in the world was thinking what I was: “Great, another browser that I have to worry about. How many things on my pages will break with this one?”

In this case, for me, not much breaks. If you’re reading my page using Safari, the title of each post will appear in the same font and size as the paragraph text below it. It should instead appear in Verdana, Helvetica, or your favorite sans serif, at 14px (slightly larger), as specified by my CSS rule for the H3 tag. Also, periodically a page will load but not show any content or only show a few images on a page; reloading generally fixes the problem. So far I haven’t found anything else broken yet. It does seem a little faster than Chimera, though I haven’t done any stopwatch exercises.

There are a bunch of other folks looking at the browser, though, chief among them Mark Pilgrim (who has both an initial review, in which he strongly states that the lack of tabbed browsing is a showstopper, and Safari Information For Web Designers, in which he summarizes rendering successes and failures of the browser). and Mena Trott (whose article contains links to most of the other big articles on the subject, including the changelog from KHTML to Safari). Finally, here is the blog of Dave Hyatt, one of the team members, in which he addresses some of the initial review comments.