Aero Glass support

What I always liked about Microsoft’s IE 7 was the fact that it was using Vista’s native Aero Glass look. Chrome is the first browser to include Aero Glass compatibility since IE 7, which makes the UI look nice and native on Vista. Mozilla should have included it in Firefox 3.

Advanced source code view

This is something I never saw in a web browser before. Chrome has just luxury source code viewer. It displays line numbers and turns everything that looks like a URL into a clickable link.

Task manager

Yeah, you have probably seen the task manager in Google’s promotional comic book released yesterday. The task manager really rocks—it even has this little link label saying “Stats for nerds” that can open advanced memory usage statistics.

Download manager

Just like Opera and Maxthon, Chrome tries to avoid using extra dialog windows. Almost everything like bookmark manager or a download manager opens its own tab that looks just like a web page.

Searching within the current page

This is something we use a lot and don’t even realize it. When you hit Ctrl+F in Chrome and start searching, every match on the page is automatically highlighted without having to click on a button like in other browsers. Too bad Chrome does not allow you to start searching immediately without pressing Ctrl+F like Firefox does.

Great compatibility

This is just a minor issue… but did you notice that Chrome has both Gecko and Safari words in its user agent string? This makes work almost every web app that officially supports Firefox or Safari. Not all developers realize that there is something like KHTML and WebKit and some of them often put the word Safari in their browser detection scripts.

Language the browser UI uses

It looks like a typical Google product. I especially love the options dialog tab named “Under the Hood”.

Prism-like functionality

The “Create application shortcut” is more useful than Mozilla Prism. Even though the browser bar is hidden when the site is running in “application mode”, you can still access basic features like Back and Find in page by clicking the window’s icon in the top left corner.

Duplicate tab

Chrome allows you to duplicate any tab through its right-click menu.

Installing missing plugins

If a site requires a certain plugin, Chrome will take you to the download page immediately, in most cases you don’t need to search through the whole plugin vendor’s site.

1. It won’t run on many computers. I tried Safari on two Windows XP PCs and one Windows Vista PC and it worked just on the last one. Both Windows XP computers did nothing when Safari.exe was executed. It might have been caused by the fact that I unchecked the “Install Bonjour” checkbox on those Windows XP systems but the browser is supposed to work without this, isn’t it?
2. Heading tags that contain links are hardly rendered correctly. They’re just missing on most sites.
   
   Where’s the post heading?
3. The Bookmarks button doesn’t work. Every time I click this button, the browser crashes.
   
   Safari Web Browser has stopped working
4. It’s too slow for me. The official site says it’s the fasted browser ever. Compared to Firefox and Opera, Safari for Windows is extremely slow. Also the interface animated effects make working with the browser slower. I wonder why they don’t use smooth scrolling.

If all the major bugs get fixed in the final release, Safari will provide a decent browsing experience on Windows and the web developers will be happy for not having to get a Mac or Mac emulator to test and debug their sites.

That’s it for today, these were my first impressions about Safari for Windows, expect more to come tomorrow. And what’s your opinion about Safari for Windows? Share it in the comments below.