My 30-day Safari
As promised, when April 1st rolled around I began my month-by-month test drives of web browsers.
First up was April and Apple’s Safari.
Safari does two things very well: The first is that it’s fast. Night-and-day in comparison to Firefox and Internet Explorer — so much so that I think I might have trouble going back unless new versions of those browsers speed up their performance. I wasn’t expecting to see a difference, but on my pretty-fast-even-for-broadband connection it is definitely notable.
The second good thing about Safari is that it looks good. Apple is good at making their products more than just functional: they’re sleek. They make you feel good about using them. Safari is no exception here. In many ways, it is simply nice to use. Once you are over the unfamiliar layout, it clearly outpaces the main competitors here as well.
The problem is that these pluses are outmatched by the negatives.
Least importantly, it’s a little buggy. I put that down to having downloaded Safari 4, which is still in Beta version. We can give Apple the benefit of the doubt, and trust that all the little bugs will be ironed out by the time Safari 4 is properly released. Still, it is worth noting that these bugs coloured my experience. The negatives seem that much worse when your browser puts itself in the background (behind some other random window) every time you try to bookmark a site.
Second, it’s still unpopular. This can be a good thing: virus writers are less likely to target it, for example. But it is a bad thing when my bank’s website is not made to support it, and I need to keep a different browser as a backup to do online banking with.
Those two are more annoyances than problems, however. Things to consider when deciding if you will make the program part of your daily life, to be sure, but in the end unimportant. One can easily ask if the increased browsing speed is worth the pain of having to open up a different browser for certain sites, and so on.
But there are a couple of things that should make everybody hesitant to use Safari:
The first of these is that Safari will treat your computer’s memory like its bitch. It just gobbles the stuff up, and comes back for more. Once I had surfed for a while or opened up more than a couple of tabs, my entire system would slow to a crawl and Safari needed to be shut down and sent to its room without dessert.
While my computer is hardly top-of-the-line (in fact, it was not top-of-the-line when I bought it two-and-a-half years ago), it is still functional. Safari slaughters it. Perhaps if you own a £2,000 wunderkomputer this won’t affect you. The rest of us should beware.
Finally — and most importantly — it is insecure. While currently less likely to suffer a successful attack than Firefox or Internet Explorer, it’s for all the wrong reasons. So few people use Safari for Windows that nobody finds it worthwhile to try to hack it.
That’s a bad way to be secure. If you choose your free web browser because you feel it is the best one, you would have to think other people would be doing the same thing.
Particularly if you’re me.
While I consider myself an up-to-date person, technology-wise, I am hardly an early adopter. If I’m considering adopting a technology, it is probably (at least) approaching a threshold of popularity which will soon make it a target for malicious attacks. Given that Apple’s customers got their first taste of being a target for these things a couple of weeks ago, this observation appears to be holding true here.
As I said when starting this whole affair, Apple products are simply less secure: Safari is the easiest to hack. Should I need to live in fear of my browser being popular?
Next up in the Big Bad Browser Battle is Google Chrome.
Reputed to be on par with Safari speed-wise, whilst being more secure than Mozilla’s Firefox … well, let’s just say Chrome has some high expectations to meet.
So far — after just one weekend — it’s doing well, but I have not even set up any bookmarks or looked for plug-ins yet.
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