Safari 3, beta is available for Mac OS and Windows

Apple has announced the main features that will be shipped with Leopard, the next generation Mac OS. Together, they unveiled the next release of Safari. Safari 3 will be available on Mac OS and on Windows (XP and Vista only as it seems). A public beta is available for download on Apple web site.

If you want to learn more about Safari, click on read more.

Safari is based on Webkit, a branch of Konqueror‘s rendering engine, KHTML. This engine has a good reputation (which I have not scientifically verified) for performance and rendering of standard HTML and CSS. I have personally tested Safari on Mac OS and even though I was not impressed by speed, I liked the slick and simple interface of this internet browser. However, a few web pages did not render properly (although they were not standard compliant) and I had to use a Gecko base browser like Camino or Firefox to visit some sites.

As I was curious to use Safari 3 and I did not have a Mac in my reach, I decided to install the Windows version on Linux (Ubuntu 7.04 32bit) by using Wine. The installation works flawlessly using Wine, but when launching the installed Safari, it complains about missing libraries. Those libraries seem to be available with the Microsoft .Net framework. I have then tried to install it, without success. It was complaining that Internet Explorer 5.01 was not installed, whereas I have Internet Explorer 6 installed… Anyway, I think it is ironic that in the end to install Safari, one needs Internet Explorer 5.01 or above.

I had to reboot under Windows to test Safari 3. I was more than happy when I saw the neat Safari interface, however it is cruelly and clearly still in beta phase. My short browsing experience with this beta was: slow performance, consuming lots of processor power and many rendering problems (most page are not displayed properly). I will post a few screen-shots tomorrow.

Hopefully, we will get a decent beta soon to try. For the time being if anyone has an idea how to fix the .Net framework installation issue on Linux, let me know.