Today, I downloaded and installed Apple's Safari 3beta for Windows. I was really disappointed when I saw all pages break, that work smoothly with M$IE, Firefox, and Epiphany. Well, breaking pages usually mean that I check out how to fix it. However, the more I digged into Safari resources, the lesser bright Apple's press release shine. Apart from the masses of usability errors in Safari for Windows, it turned out that Safari 3 is not prepared for professional web-technologies.

The good news for Apple is that I was able to confirm the speed in javascript performance of their browser: it was indeed really fast handling my scripts. However, the price that comes with the speed is that 90% of the scripts were not even executed. A very sad thing.

The bad news is that Apple decided not to make the XSLTProcessor object available to javascript code. Clean service oriented web-systems that separate code from content and layout are thus not possible with Safari. But then, for what other reason one needs an XSLTProcessor integrated in a web-browser?

The disaster continued when I checked the preferences for the browser. On the first sight it looks like a copy of the Firefox preferences dialog. On the second sight, however, it turns out that Apple removed all the neat configuration switches and left a few widgets per dialog tab. There is not much to configure or to tweak with Safari - which might be good for the dummies. In the end, I felt like an idiot because I got "defeated by a dialog box". Because of this dialog alone Apple should stop claiming "usability" any longer: they have as much knowledge about usability as their biggest competitors.

Furthermore, there are no basic debugging facilities integrated with Safari. While even M$IE comes with some basic tools straight out of the box, there is absolutely no way to find out what goes wrong if a web-page renders wrongly in Safari.

After all, I decided to uninstall Safari again and released some of my valuable disk space. It seems that I don't belong to the hundreds of million users who want to experience an incredibly good looking Web1.0 browser, that fails with the basics of daily life. I have serious doubts, if there are so many millions of users who will join the Safari trip to the apple country, because I agree with this slashdot article.