Stopwatches at 30 paces.
The results show that Safari is slower than both IE 7 and Firefox in the login page and message index tests, in both cases by a substantial margin. Only when loading Google Calendar does Safari have a slight edge, clocking in at 12.8 seconds to IE’s 17 seconds. But even there, Firefox has both the other browsers beat.
Safari on Windows is not slow. The question is, are you willing to put up with a Mac-like interface, wonky text anti-aliasing and some weird rendering, without your FireFox plugins? I’m going to give it a try and see how it goes. It’s a lot to ask.
Bonus: Scott has video.
I am not getting in the middle of this one.
Ed Bott (@ wordpress.com) 
Just to put things in perspective — afaik Wired tested Safari only with GoogleMail & Calendar – and that are a nice and useful sites, no doubt — but they are very special, heavely javascripted site swith some extra tricks and not a normal Webpage. For a real speed-test one should try some more common sites or at least a broader mix.
That’s no excuse for the lame Safari-Performance on Windows. The problem with this “public beta” is, that it’s not a beta, it’s pre alpha at best. And it’s definetley nothing I expected from Apple. I don’t think that it was such a smart move to publish Safari for Windows at this time.
Btw – even on Mac OS X I still prefer Firefox, alltough it’s not a Cocoa-App and I can’t use the Mac OS Services with it.
It certainly seems slow to me.
Even after a page has basically rendered, it often takes a surprising amount of time to download images, and sometimes does not at all until a refresh.
Besides, I’m helpless without mouse gestures.
It’s not that slow…http://thenewsroom.com/details/396038?c_id=wom-bc-js
I’m not sure why it’s needed but it doesn’t suck as much as I expected. I wrote about what I like yesterday.
What really annoys me is Apple insists on using their own Human Interface Guidelines even when they create programs for Windows users. While their buttons are intuitive for Mac users, they should adjust the UI for folks used to Windows standards.
The best example is the placement of the Cancel button vs Action button. On a Mac the action is always on the right with the cancel on the left. On a Windows machine “Cancel” is rightmonth or bottom.
Bill
Safari really beats FF hands down on my system, but the fonts suck, and !? what’s this
Bah. It’s still Beta software, so performance metrics are quite irrelevant at this point. However, supposedly it’s feature complete, and a lot of features I’ve grown to love in FF are not avaialble in Safari just yet, and THAT does not bode well for the browser.
That and the UI (IMHO).
I use http://www.live.com as my home page and I don’t have more than 30 RSS feeds that I read so I use it as my feed reader as well. Safari does not render http://www.live.com as anything other than a search engine, thus I uninstalled it.
“I am not getting in the middle of this one”
I don’t blame you as it is getting quite heated in there, at least it is in the wired one 🙂
There’s simply too much variation in the OS configuration and hardware configuration – and network congestion – to actually judge this. The best you could do would be to render LOCAL pages on the SAME box, freshly repaved to eliminate the effects of Windows XP prefetch or Windows Vista Superfetch.
I fully expect that Superfetch explains why Joel Spolsky saw Safari start out slow but get faster.
Opera beats them all and easily beat Safari even on the Mac OS:
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html
Mike Prefetch only effects initial load times and can easily be optimized for by doing the following before testing for cold start times of the browser:
Launch the browser two times
Go to “Start”, “Run”, Type Rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks. This can take 10-15 minutes to run but no notification will be given when it is finished. You will notice increased Harddrive activity while it is running wait until this stops.
Then in the “Run” box Type defrag c: -b and wait until the command prompt window disappears.
Reboot Windows and time the initial lauch of the Browser.
You will now have accurate cold start times of the browser you are timing.
Andrew, you should note that those instructions work only on Windows XP, not on Windows Vista.
Safari for windows runs very fast on my acer laptop, faster than IE or FF. But it runs terribly slow on my desktop, which has more than enough memory (1024) and is way faster than my laptop.
Not sure why. Images take forever to load. Running XP standard on laptop, XP Media Center on desktop.
Those instructions do work on Vista as well as XP, Ed Bott.
safari takes forever to start up. and then when it does it is slow as sh-t. i am running it on windows XP. it is not the beta.
as a browser safari is ok, but the mac ui on windows does my head in..
they should have given us the option to use a normal ui
kevin – you bought an acer? with money? for yourself?
safari takes WAY too long to load. vaio desktop HT 3.6GHz, 2GB RAM.
i couldnt bear another moment with IE, HATE firefox, didnt like opera. running out of options.
would love safari if it wasnt so damn long to load and also, crashes a bit too often. doesnt clear out certain form entries either 😉
dude safari is fastest web browser in the world. even beats firefox 3, but somehow, the bug of first load of safari is bit slow. but once it load. it speed up really fast. I used safari before, but abit not sure, then try firefox, try it for while now still going back to safari. the only thing is it’s not very protective, but as long as u have antivirus u got nothing to worry about