Newly released to the public, Safari is Apple’s own browser found in OS X. While still in Beta, Safari for Windows offers another inside look to that other camp: the Mac computer. Many of us already use a few Mac applications. Even the most devout PC user has QuickTime and/or iTunes. Let’s see if Safari offers enough to sway any Internet Explorer or Firefox users to Apple’s side.

Apple offers Safari for OS X of course, as well as XP or Vista. Not surprisingly, you can download it bundled with QuickTime, but you can also grab the standalone browser. Apple emphasizes the speed, user interface, RSS feeds and Security among the top features, along with the standard features that even Internet Explorer can boast, such as a popup blocker, tabbed browsing and search. After downloading Safari (8MB standalone), Apple helps you start with a mini-guide to adding plug-ins, setting preferences, importing bookmarks and setting up RSS feeds.

During installation, you can choose to include Apple’s ‘Bonjour’ for network device setup and/or Apple Software Update. Keep in mind that the latter is installed along with iTunes, so you may already have it. Safari will automatically import your bookmarks from both Internet Explorer and Firefox without any intervention on your part. While exploring the Bookmarks, you will also find a few dozen others categorized into News/Shopping/Entertainment/Mac etc.

Shockingly, your homepage in Safari defaults to Apple’s start page, not their website. The start page is most news stories (which all seem to relate to Apple, interesting eh?) with plenty of links to Apple’s various types of content.

Safari will not look different from any other major browsers, aside from the metallic skin. You will still see a bookmark toolbar, address bar, Google search box and some navigation buttons. And as this is still Beta software, the button with a spider logo lets you quickly report bugs back to Apple.

In my unscientific testing, Safari functioned perfectly well as my browser. All of my usual sites would load quickly and correctly, even complex pages with Flash and Java. I have not experienced any lockups, though there are reports of bugs here and there on the web.

I compared RAM usage between Safari and Internet Explorer 7 by opening just one page in each. IE came in around 28MB, while Safari came in at 51MB. Clearly Safari is a bit more of a RAM hog than IE, but this should not be an issue for anyone with plenty of RAM (512MB and higher). Here are a few other Safari observations:

• Private browsing allows you to turn off the history and not save downloads, Autofill, or searches with a single click.
• Safari automatically recognized my other browsers and did not make itself the default.
• A convenient control panel lets you change fonts, tab behavior, RSS updates, Autofill text (to fill in registration forms) and security options such as disabling Java or cookies.
• The plug-ins available are not only what we have come to expect in browsers, but they were already installed. They include the ‘Big 6′; Flash, Acrobat, QuickTime, Windows Media Player, Real and Java.
• Apple claims that Safari is twice as fast as Internet Explorer and 1.6x faster than Firefox. I compared Safari and IE7 with several of my everyday haunts on the web and found that Safari was faster for some sites, but IE was faster on others. The difference was never more then a second or two either way, so I would say that the speed claims are a wash for anyone with a high speed connection.

I did have a few minor quibbles with Safari. It did not recognize the back/forward buttons on my mouse as Internet Explorer does. There is no drop-down box on the address bar, so you’ll have to add frequent visits to your bookmarks. Finally, to go back to a certain page in your history, you have to click and hold on the back button, there is no drop down box otherwise. Given all that though, I will say that these were too small for me to stop using Safari. And this is still Beta software, so any of them could be upcoming fixes.

To conclude, Safari is a solid product from Apple, even in Beta form. It performs admirably as a browser serving up the web as any of the ‘big players’ can. It may not offer enough to sway the longtime Internet Explorer or Firefox fan, but it is certainly worth a look; if only to peek over the fence at Camp Apple. http://www.apple.com/safari/