Safari 3: Finally a real browser?

I installed the Safari 3 Beta on Monday, and have spent the week playing around with it in my (limited) free time. With the launch of Leopard this week, which includes Safari 3, I thought it would be nice to take a test drive, and I have to say that I am very impressed.

Those of you with iPhones (Matt) have been using Safari 3 all along, and have probably noticed that it is a pretty solid browser, despite the fact that it is on a tiny touch-screen. On OS X, Safari is a really strong browser. Fast load times, great HTML rendering, and best of all, great AJAX support. I have spent a lot of time visiting sites that never worked quite right with Safari 2 (I called those the 'Firefox only' sites) and they have all performed flawlessly thus far. Apple's website says that it renders HTML faster than any other browser, but I don't know that I believe that—mainly because IE and Firefox say the same thing.

The best new feature is the updated "Find" feature (command + F on your keyboard) for finding text within a web page. Start entering the text string you are looking for, and Safari dims the entire page, highlighting matching strings. Clicking the Next button "pops" matching text to your attention much like iChat.

If you think you'd like to give it a try, you can download it from Apple's website.

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