Safari 3 (beta) vs. FireFox2 vs. IE7 on Windows
The browser wars are heating up, you might be surprised by the results.

At the World Wide Developer Conference this week, Apple announced the availability of Safari 3 for the Windows operating system. Today, we put the Safari 3 beta to the test to see how it compares to Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 on Windows. What we found didn't impress us very much. Although Safari offers slightly faster page loading, the beta is extremely unstable and suffers from interface deficiencies that make its value on the Windows platform questionable at best.

Windows quirks

The most glaring flaw of Safari 3 on Windows is its utter lack of stability. The prerelease beta status of Safari 3 obviously must be taken into account when evaluating the program's reliability, but the problems I faced during testing really exceed tolerable limits for beta software. The Firefox 3 alpha build I reviewed last week is far more stable and robust than the current beta build of Safari 3. Safari hangs and freezes frequently, and once it completely locked up my system, necessitating a hard reset. Unlike Firefox, Safari 3 can't automatically restore the previous browsing session after a crash. Instability makes testing a frustration, but I don't think that this problem should be interpreted as an intractable failing of Safari 3 in light of the program's prerelease status. Although I think it is likely that Apple will resolve these problems before issuing an official release, I strongly discourage users from testing the current Safari 3 beta on a production system.

Read all about it here, courtesy of arstechnica.com

Eric