Apple Safari 5.1.7 for Windows

By Michael Muchmore

It was always something of a mystery why Apple chose to make Safari for Windows. Some said the company wanted to get Windows developers familiar with the iPhone's browser to encourage Web app development on iOS. But then why not just make it available to developers? In any case, the Windows version looks to be getting less emphasis than ever these days: While Safari for Mac was recently updated to version six, the Windows version no longer is even mentioned on Apple's Safari page. There's been widespread speculation that Apple has killed off Safari for Windows, but despite the hysteria, Safari is still available for download. Whatever the future may hold for it, Safari for Windows is gorgeous, still performs well, and adds some compelling differences from the general run of browsers, but it's falling behind in some measures such as startup time and hardware acceleration.

Safari would win the browser beauty pageant. Its Top Sites page, showing a 3D gallery of your most-visited sites, and its Cover Flow history view are pleasures to behold. The browser window radiates the tasteful, understated design prowess that has become a hallmark of the Cupertino tech luminary. And it's not just looks: Safari has respectable speed and standards support, too. Nevertheless, you still may occasionally run into a site that doesn't play as well as it would in Firefox (Free, 4 stars), Internet Explorer (Free, 4 stars), or Google Chrome (Free, 4.5 stars) .

A unique feature among browsers is Safari's Reading List. Summoned through a cute eyeglasses icon to the top and left of the Web page area, Reading List lets you save pages you're interested in but don't have time to peruse till later. It's really just a variant on a bookmark or history feature, but the left sidebar showing the site icons and titles for pages you add do make it easier to find. An oddity of the feature, though, is that, once you click on a page's entry to view it, the entry disappears from the list and you can't re-add it even if you didn't actually finish reading it. Luckily, you can recall pages with an "All" option in the sidebar.

Safari Reader
Another reading helper, the "Safari Reader" mode, is an exclusive Safari feature that strips out non-essential elements of a page (including pictures and video) so you can focus on the text. The Reader view is a great boon for those vexed by constant text popups and distracting elements, which have more and more come to dominate the Web. For starters, Safari Reader saves you from installing an ad-blocker. Not only does Safari Reader block ads, it also attempts to display all pages of multipage articles in Reader view. To activate it, simply click the "Reader" button that appears in the address bar for pages that the browser has determined can benefit from it.

I tested by surfing to PCMag.com. Clicking the button produced what looked like a white sheet of paper with the article's text in a large readable serif font (I couldn't find a way to choose a different font). Occasionally, Reader missed the formatting of some elements within the text, like our rating buttons, and some articles still show the Next button instead of letting you scroll down the whole article. But mostly everything in the main text body displayed fine, including tables, and inline images, but the Reader button does not kick in for Flash pages. A superimposed toolbar appears at the bottom of the page, letting you easily zoom, email, print the cleaned up article. The browser will remember the zoom size you chose for next time.

A similar feature is now available in Maxthon 3.4 (free, 4 stars), and Opera is pushing for new HTML5 standards that will allow websites to reproduce reading experiences with gestures for page turning and text wrapping around images, called CSS Generated Content for Paged Media.

Search Options and Extensions
Apple made Bing an optional search engine in Safari 5.0, which is a step in the right direction, considering Safari on the Mac long offered only one choice, Google (on Windows, Safari previously offered a choice between Google and Yahoo). This is an improvement, though IE and Firefox still offer more in the way of search choice, with galleries of more specialized search options (such as Wikipedia) and ways to switch search provider right from the search bar.

Apple announced that Safari 5 would support extensions starting with version 5, and at this point there's a helpful selection at the Safari Extensions Gallery. Safari extensions allow developers to add toolbars, menu items, and buttons to the app window or to modify web pages?more than Google Chrome extensions offer. Apple has even added an Extension Builder, accessible from the Develop menu (which you can enable from the Advanced settings tab).

Installing an extension in Safari is the easiest thing possible: Find the one you want in the gallery and click the Install Now button. That's it. Ad-blocking and Facebook cleaning top the list of popular extensions, but there are plenty of choices to appeal to all tastes, such as an MLB toolbar with game scores, a Twitter toolbar, and even a screenshot extension.

Tabs
Safari does an excellent job of implementing tabs. You can move the tabs back and forth on the bar, and even out onto the desktop to create a new window. I also found it simple to drag a tab from one browser window into another. If you hover the mouse over a tab other than the current page displaying, the "X" for closing it helpfully appears?something you won't find in Maxthon. And now Safari's tabs show site icons (a nice visual cue) as they do in other major browsers.

Another minor disappointment is that the tab toolbar doesn't display by default?in most other browsers, opening a new tab is a simple matter of clicking a Plus sign next to your last tab. But the browser's new-tab page yields a beautiful 3D gallery view of your 12 most visited sites to choose from, much like Opera's Speed Dial. You can also get an Apple signature Cover Flow view of your history.

You can choose to have links always open in new tabs rather than in a new browser window, but I wish this were the default, as it is in most other browsers. Safari's address bar displays history and bookmark suggestions for any title text you start typing, as opposed to just text from the address?a help to faster navigation.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/JU2KaFFZSIc/0,2817,2364856,00.asp

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