Windows 7 Software Compatibility Testing - Safari

Safari, the popular web browser for Mac OS X, is also available for Windows, with new design and incredible navigation speed. Starting with the development of the WebKit open source web engine, Apple has opted to implement web standards. Safari 4 includes HTML 5 support for off-line technologies and advanced CSS effects support, thus opening the door to a new category of rich multimedia web applications, graphics and fonts. This amazing web browser has passed the Web Standards Project's Acid3 test, which examines the browser's adequacy to the CSS, JavaScript, SVG and XML standards specifically designed for dynamic web applications.

Safari 4 includes Top Sites for a preview of the favorite and frequently visited pages, Full History Search to search the titles, web addresses and the full text of recently visited pages, and Cover Flow to easily come back to web history or bookmarks. Other innovative features include Smart Address Fields to automatically complete web addresses from an easy to read suggestions list; Search Fields to refine searches recommendations Google Suggest or a list of recent searches and Full Page Zoom for zooming in or out to any website without degrading the quality of site layout and text.

Another strength of Safari is its private browsing which is ideal for visiting web-pages leaving no record in the history or in the cookies and downloads list. Safari also takes into account the favorites and it can also be an excellent RSS reader. It also has the ability to block pop-ups, keep our form data and passwords and it includes a tool to access the code of the page we are visiting.

For further reading on its latest improvements check this article, and here for a full review.

Today I'm going to tell you about Safari's behavior under the Windows 7 environment.

Installation & Run
It could not be otherwise, this Apple product was completely installed and running without hitches in an interim of very few minutes and in only four simple steps. Without incompatibilities of any type and in the easiest possible way. The first two steps of the installation process were the Welcome and License Agreement windows.

After agreeing, I was taken to the Installation Options, in that window I could choose location, shortcuts, update options and the possibility to install Bonjour for Windows.

Clicking on the Install button started the installation process itself , not longer than 1 minute later the installation was complete and a windows telling that it was successfully installed was shown, it brought the possibility to open Safari as well.

When safari runs for the first time, it shows an animation to welcome us. Immediately after that, the Top Sites page appears.

So, when it comes to installing and running for the first time, Safari presents no hitches, delays on incompatibilities of any kind. Moreover, it is incredibly fast and easy to understand.

Functionality & Integration
In order to test Safari's functionality I opened ten tabs and although it took almost 240MB of RAM (almost double of Firefox with ten tabs opened) switching between tabs and zooming them in or out presented no problems.

Another performance test to have in account is the Acid3 test and as you can see in the next screenshot, Safari got 100/100.

Note: As a point of reference I run the same test on the latest stable Firefox version and it got 93/100

Regarding integration with Microsoft's latest operating system, I must say that it is perfect, no troubles or incompatibilities of any kind. Aero features worked fine too.

Bugs Report
As in my testings I could not find any bugs or incompatibilities, I searched the web in general and specific forums in particular for comments, posts or complaints and I must tell you that apart from some opinions of users liking it or not or some other people complaining about Safari's lack for add-ons, I could not find bugs reports or incompatibilities for Safari 4.0.3 running under Windows 7 RC1 (which is the configuration I use for this testings), maybe this version is rather new and it's just a matter of time for other kind of comments or complaints to appear. So, let's stay tuned and see what happens.

Final Words
In spite of its lack of add-ons and quite high resources consumption, Safari is a really interesting browser for us to run in our Windows 7 machine. It is quick and snappy and provides a great user experience as well, so why not giving it a try?

If you have installed and run Safari under Windows 7, we would like to hear what is your opinion about it. Please leave your comments below.