Remember, these were darker days. Webkit was the strange thing on the internet. There was no Chrome. There was Konqueror, but the webkits had diverged. You made your site work on IE and Firefox in your preferred order, then after drying your tears with the shredded remains of your schedule gave two minute's thought to making it not obviously be complete rubbish on Safari and maybe Opera.
So of course it sucks on windows.
• It feels like a Mac but in a Windows world which is like speaking English with an outrageously French accent.
• It operates through layers of compatibility designed to identically preserve the Mac behavior above perform well.
• When you come down to it, it is the away team. If the user wanted a Mac experience, they'd have a Mac.
But that's on a Mac.
At my last job I had a Windows box. I installed Safari as soon as it was released on Windows for testing purposes. I wouldn't have minded switching, but there was one cold fact in the way: Safari was a pig.
I haven't used it on Windows in about a year, so it may be better, but at the time it took a long time to start Safari up. Later releases were better, but it still would feel slow launching and opening tabs. All and all, I stayed with FireFox.
I recommend Safari as a good browser for anyone who uses OS X. When people I know have bought Macs and asked if they need to download FF or Chrome, I tell them there is no need. Give Safari a try. Only one or two hasn't stuck with it, it fits all their needs.
On Windows I would tell them FF or Chome. Based on my experience there was no reason to recommend Safari.
I think it's too late. Even if Apple made Safari an amazing browser on Windows it's a very crowded market. FF is huge, Chrome is big and gaining. IE 8/9 are pretty nice browsers. That's 3 good choices. I have a hard time seeing Apple get any meaningful Windows marketshare.
Frankly, I think Safari is only on Windows to allow developers to test their sites to work better on iOS without having the devices or Macs. Any promotion to consumers is very half-hearted.
As for why I use Chrome (Even on my Macs); It's just more pleasant to use. It's the sort of thing that's hard to put a finger on, though it does run google web apps way better than the competition which is a huge reason for me also.
Even though Chrome and Safari share a foundation, I just find Chrome more usable. Things like keyboard commands to open the last closed tab, how it waits to resize tabs until after you move your mouse away form the tab bar, and the animated sorting of tabs just to name a couple. Chrome feels faster too; hard to quantify, but apparently quite important to user perception.
There, I put my finger on it.
1. It's fast
2. It updates automatically
3. It has a single location/search bar
For me, that's it. Really.
And it may just be a coincidence, but it's similar to QuickTime.
Yay! There's a new trailer for the Alien prequel out, and it's ... hosted at Apple. That means I'll see it in a window that doesn't full screen, whose controls don't work right, and it probably won't even download regardless of how often I click it. Thank the FSM, someone has posted a link to the trailer on YouTube.
1. Chrome is marketed all over the web (and in real life) and bundled through shareware. Google is spending a tremendous amount of money to market Chrome. Apple is not doing that with Safari.
2. Safari is the default in OS X, but OS X is still small compared to Windows.
3. Safari on Windows is not as fast as Safari on OS X, presumably because Apple cares more about one than the other, whereas Chrome is fast on both platforms. The author seems to assume that since they are both WebKit browsers, that means they are the same, but that isn't true by any measure: First, Google doesn't use the WebKit multiprocess code or the WebKit JS engine, it has its own, and both of those components are very important for speed; and second, even aside from those there are many factors that go into making a browser fast, and just using WebKit (or Gecko or Trident or whatever) doesn't fix them automatically.
The real question is how many people use Safari on OS X. That's where it is optimized and bundled. I am guessing the percentage is pretty high, but if it is low, then that would be a surprising fact that requires explanation.
I'd guess that's as much because Safari is the built-in, default option on OS X and iOS as it is because Safari is just super awesome. The more interesting thing to me is that all of my (Mac-using)coworkers have switched over (mostly from Firefox) to Chrome, despite Chrome's overall jankyness on OS X.
Chrome is my everything else browser. Mainly because it has a unified url/search bar. I have no idea with Safari hasn't picked this up, but that's pretty much it.
Oh and also because all the google apps just seem to work better on Chrome.
I used use Firefox as my everything browser, but it got just too slow. I mostly only use it for testing and doing front-end development.
Privacy, perhaps? Doesn't a unified url/search bar require giving more information to Google (or whatever your default search provider is)?
I've found that browsers have become a study in small touches and interesting niches. Firefox, for a long time, had a lock on the "I want to mod the hell out of this" niche. Meanwhile, as trite as it sounds, I couldn't leave Safari for the longest time because I had become addicted to the address bar also showing load progress.
These days, I use Chrome, but not because of speed. I use Chrome because I have become addicted to OpenSearch (the "Press tab to search this site"). Apple's refusal to merge the address bar and search bar used to be forgivable, but it is increasingly becoming a pointless distinction to hold out on (and will cost them market share).
I like the idea of iTunes and open it occasionally but after a day or two of using it, I am reminded of just how bad it really is.
Really, the only thing that prevents Safari from being the "worst" mainstream browser is the existence of IE.
It's not awful. It just pairs mediocre performance with fewer features and lower extensibility.
Apple's attention really is turned to the mobile space today, and the non-mobile Safari suffers for it.
Safari sucks, especially on Windows.
Chrome rocks, especially on Windows.
