I bit my lip and installed the new Safari beta on a couple of Macs and an old Windows PC running XP. I’ve been using it since Monday and I like what I see.

Performance is notably quicker with page renderings than any browser on any machine I have. The little things are impressive, too, such as the new inline search tool with the orange find frames.  Sweet touch. When searching on a page, the whole page dims a bit, and the search term is highlight in orange. I swear it throbs.

The resizable text fields is handy and thoughtful and being able to move tabs around, left to right or right to left is a touch of genius, even if Apple didn’t think of it first.

Checking the preferences it doesn’t look like there’s many new features but I’ve been able to log into my bank’s web site and check balance, which I could only do with Firefox before.

Safari 3 is evolutionary for Mac users, but might be revolutionary for Windows users. Firefox is rather geeky, and Safari is rather minimial, so it’ll be interesting to see what kind of market share Apple gets when they begin to bundle Safari with iTunes and QuickTime for Windows users.

Bit of randomness but if you click on a link with the scroll button on a three button mouse it opens in a new tab. Also the new consolidate open windows to on tabbed window is slick as is the reload open windows from last session. Anyone check to see if SVG works?

Jack just put the beta of Safari on our Macs and on our PC. Today there’s already a security update on the Safari for Windows version.

On the Mac, Safari is notably faster than the previous version, and easily faster than Firefox, or OmniWeb, which, Jack tells me, also uses the WebKit engine.

On the PC it is difficult to see that Safari is much faster than Internet Explorer 7. Pages snap into view very quickly on both, actually a little faster than the same pages on my Mac running Safari. I’m not using a stopwatch or any timer. It’s just how it “feels”. It feels good.  We haven’t had any hiccups or crashes on either machine.

My favorite new Safari features are the inline search tool which is a great touch, and the moveable tabs. Classy.

For my money (o yea, it’s free...), the Find feature is freak’n awesome now.

I just want it to load pages without reload. I have been hitting my page load limits on this site by reloading too rapidly too many times. Sometimes it starts the load numerous times in rapid succession, and then gives me white.

I downloaded the Mac Safari 3 beta on release day. On install it notified I’d have to restart. Backed out—I had over 20 apps running and I didn’t want the hassle to launch them all again.

Looks like Safari might be a hit with Windows users. One million downloads in 48 hours. Not too shabby.

I installed, used it for a bit then uninstalled.  Nothing earth shattering for me.  The new camino seems just as fast.  Biggest thing for me though was it broke widgets that use webkit.  As soon as I found that I uninstalled it.  It apparently modifies webkit, and they don’t tell you.  I don’t need a beta of any browser that much.