I’ve been playing with Apple’s new Safari browser for a while now, and it’s actually not too bad. It is the fastest browser I’ve seen since Internet Explorer 2.0. Pages render at a speed that’s almost frightening. It also loads faster than any other browser on the Mac or any other platform I’ve seen as well.
The bad? It uses the KHTML rendering system from KDE, and it has some very spotty CSS compliance. However, most sites (including this one) render just fine. Also notable in its absence is tabbed browsing, a feature that doesn’t seem very useful at first but soon becomes second nature.
There’s a lot of questioning as to why Apple didn’t go with Gecko for their new browser. The Gecko engine (that powers Mozilla and its derivatives) is a very good engine, but KHTML is a speed demon. With luck, the Apple engineers will add some better CSS compliance to KHTML and release it back into the public code. Until then, if you’re not worried about strict CSS compliance and want a blazingly fast browser for Mac OSX, Safari fits the bill rather nicely.
