Safari 3 For Windows -- First Impressions

As soon as I heard the announcement, I downloaded the public beta of Safari 3 for Windows.  So far I'm pretty impressed.  The memory usage seems to come in between Firefox (the worst) and Opera (the best).  ThinWire, my web application framework, works beautifully.  Gmail works fine, but Yahoo Mail has some issues (I get lots of JS errors).

I did a quick performance benchmark.  ThinWire has a Grid component that can display lots of data.  I fired up my benchmark app for the Grid, and added 10,000 rows.  Here's the performance results:

  • Internet Explorer 7: 1 minute 33.66 seconds
  • Opera 9: 27.93 seconds
  • Firefox 2: 23.24 seconds
  • Safari 3 Beta: 18.91 seconds
I realize that there is only approximately a 4 second improvment over Firefox 2 in this test, but 4 seconds is a lifetime in terms of waiting for a web application to load.

Also, while the Grid was loading, the rest of the app was still responsive; I could even start browsing and scrolling the Grid.Also, a quick look in the install directory reveals some interesting libraries.  WebKit was there as expected, but also CoreFoundation (Apple's base C library) and CoreGraphics (the main OS X graphics library).  Very interesting.

Ted C. Howard @ted