Safari on Windows - Underwhelmed

After seeing Scott Hanselman’s experience with Safari, I thought I’d share mine:

The good:

• Did not make it the default browser automatically (didn’t even ask me if that’s what I wanted when I ran it).  Nice…
• While usually a problem with Apple, it seems that (if you downloaded just the browser and not Quicktime bundle and de-selected the options in the installer) that all you get in the browser…not magic services added…good news.
• Private Browsing (allowing you to go to pages but no history or auto-fill is supported) is an interesting idea…not that I would have a need for such a thing ;)

The bad:

• They are using their own font smoothing and it looks fuzzy to me, maybe i’d get used to it, but I doubt it:

<click picture for full size view>

• I don’t find it faster (Scott does, but IE7 seems faster).
• The bookmarks implementation (taking over the entire screen) is just annoying…perhaps there is a way of changing it but I didn’t dig too deep to find out.
• As with all Apple apps, they don’t behave like windows apps.  My particular annoyance is that with their application maximized my ‘auto-hide’ start bar doesn’t work. This means they are drawing to the edge of the screen instead of following the Windows design guidelines.
• Integrated Search bar only seems to support Yahoo and Google.  While I use Google usually, i’d like to see a more open approach like MS did for their integrated search box.
• Seems to be missing zoom facility that I like in IE7.
• Autocomplete on the address bar is perplexing…they actually found old URL’s that I have never typed on this machine (maybe there is a bookmark or something with it or they are getting it from somewhere mystical…made me very nervous).
• RSS Feed support is mixed in with Bookmarks and is confusing to me.  I don’t like any browser’s implementation yet so this isn’t as much a problem with Safari as it is with all browsers so far.

I found the browser quite unstable too, I had a total of six crashes in the 1/2 hour I browsed with it.  Too bad, more competition in the browser area is usually a good thing (except if you’re a web developer ;)