[griffman]

I didn't experience any of those issues -- in particular, I spent a bunch of time finding and opening large PDFs, just to see if I could use that slick new PDF console shown on the Leopard page. Not once did the beta crash on my 15" MacBook Pro. I also never had to hit reload to make a page appear.
I'm no saying these aren't issues, but they didn't occur for me (or else I would have mentioned them!).
-rob.

[gfair]

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Yes, I was warned: its a beta. -- but boy does this beta crash.
In fact I never did get it to launch.

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Woot... finally I can add another Apple product to my PC. Safari on XP booted perfectly.
janus - Safari booted for me first time, and after extensive testing I've not had a single crash. This is on a Windows XP PC though.
longofest - You are probably eating into virtual memory with your RAM limits. I've got 2 Gigs of ram and on a 3-tab comparison, Firefox was over 100 MB, while Safari was at 77 MB. At four tabs Firefox jumped to 121 MB, while Safari went up to 85 MB... so chances are you need more Ram. At 512, you can expect a small but noticeable speed bump going to 1 Gig of Ram, and your computer won't be thrashing your hard drive as much, so I'd highly recommend that you consider it.

salmoriarty - Not sure specifically what you are talking about, but in the Preferences menu, it shows the standard Windows font menu, with a preview of the fonts, just like it does for most apps, including MS Word. Are you on Vista? On XP it's running beautifully.
Toki - chances are there will be some differences. Apple may go out of its way to make Safari look identical for Mac and PC, but running on Windows is very different. As a Beta product I'd predict that it will be more of a memory hog on Windows, because it's had that much more development and refining on the Mac.
That said... in testing the Safari Beta on Windows XP, the memory usage is better than Firefox so far, and in a couple more tests than the ones mentioned above, too.

Overall.. it seems to be a very mature Beta product on my machine. I've been using it for quite a while and have had no crashes, nor seen any bugs.

BraceD - The ClearType is hard on the eyes because of the font in question, I think the font is slightly smaller than it is on most browsers, and Apple has some font-spacing to work on, too. The default font has too little spacing between letters, so this is likely where most of your eye strain is coming from.
As for a performance hog... I actually abandoned Firefox 2 because it was just a nightmare to work with. I use Firefox 1.5 and even Firefox 1.5 uses a lot more memory than Safari does. That said, compare the same websites side-to-side Firefox and Safari for a fair comparison. Thus far, I'm seeing way less memory usage on Safari than on Firefox, and performance is equal to Firefox 1.5, and way better than Firefox 2.
Again... I've had no issues with Safari so far. It's stable, has much better memory usage than Firefox 1.5, and the page load speed is on-par with Firefox 1.5 and IE 7. Gotta love a Beta that works as good as a commercial product...

[gfair]

AMAZING... Safari 3 passes the Acid 2 web standard test. No other browser I use has ever been able to do the same. This is, at least in my eyes, a big step up in web standards compatibility.
Also the person that said DHTML didn't run... I've been to some very DHTML heavy sites and they ALL work.
To take the Acid2 Test, follow this link:
http://www.webstanda...g/action/acid2/
On the page, the link to take the test is on the right-hand side of the page, it's called "take the Acid2 test!".

[Complexity]

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Im still not certain exactly why Apple felt it necessary to release Safari for Windows...

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My guess is this has to do with the iPhone since Safari is on the iPhone, and the iPhone is not intended for just Mac users. If Apple wants to get Windows people used to the features in iPhone, it's important to seamlessly streamline things between the phone and computer (be it Mac or Windows).
There are some things that may be able to be synced, such as preferences, bookmarks, autofill info, etc.
Plus, it certainly doesn't hurt to begin helping Windows users to become familiar with Apple's software. Makes "switching" just that much easier when the Windows person already feels comfortable with some of the apps on both platforms. I just hope Apple can get the kinks out of the Windows version of Safari before releasing it as a full version. People are very picky about their browsers, and if their first try with Safari is not good, they may never try it again and it might even push some potential switchers to rethink their decision. Apple can really make it or break it with this move.
While those ideas may not be even close to the reason, I still think putting Safari on Windows is very important since Safari is on the iPhone. It would be foolish to expect Windows users to require two different browsers between their iPhone and computer.

[TYates]

Warning, if you use 1passwd, know that it will not work with Safari 3. Other than that, no issues.

[gfair]

A couple of features I'd like to see added:
- When clicking on the URL, Firefox and IE select the whole URL, Safari just inserts the cursor, you have to Ctrl-A to capture the whole URL. One-click is much easier.
- PC users are used to status bars on the bottom. Safari doesn't have that, but I'm not sure Apple wants to try to break with convention. On the Mac it's fine, everyone loves Apple, but on the PC I find that Safari windows look incomplete. On IE and F, the bar closes off the window bottom, it makes the window look whole, but with Safari the bottom is more of an "infinity pool" that blurs the distinction between one window's bottom and other windows that may be below it.
- The font-spacing has to be widened. The font spacing is causing letters to be combined, making it hard to read them. Safari won't last long on the PC if it causes eye or head aches.
I'll send this off to Apple Feedback too.

[randombob]

For me, on Mac OS X, I have noticed that Safari 3.0 is a LOT better at memory management. Where before I'd end up with 100MB+ with 5-6 tabs or so, in the new release the same pages take up 2/3 that amount. and with activity monitor running, it actually starts going DOWN after that. Much better. Bravo, they've fixed pretty much everything I thought needed to be fixed.

[griffman]

You can enable a bottom status bar: View -> Show Status Bar. I believe I tested and that is also present on the PC. For whatever reason, it ships off by default on the Mac, too.
-rob.

[icerabbit]

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AMAZING... Safari 3 passes the Acid 2 web standard test. No other browser I use has ever been able to do the same. This is, at least in my eyes, a big step up in web standards compatibility.

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Btw: Safari 2.0.x has supported it for ... eh ... a year?

[wolfpackfan]

I was excited at first about this release, but after using it (or trying to use it) for several hours, it seems much slower than either Firefox or IE 7. Plus the main attraction for me was how it would handle RSS feeds. Overall it seems rather flaky in handling feeds. Is there no way to do a manul update. Plus I was thinking it would display the number of unread articles on the toolbar, but it doesn't. I'd say this is more of an alpha than a beta.

[trip1ex]

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I was wondering if it would be as big of a hog as it as on a Mac.

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On my Windows XP Pro (real PC, not virtual), Task Manager shows that Safari uses very little CPU (comparable to IE) but takes up 3-4 times the memory (~188,928K vs ~55,000K for IE). .

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Yeah I noticed this too. And 3.0 seems to be the same memory hog/thrifty cpu user.
I did notice that, while the Activity Monitor shows Safari currently using 234mb of memory, the System memory tab shows only 155mb of memory on the entire system is active. So perhaps Safari keeps old data (ie your recent history) in memory, but if other apps need it then it they can take it?
I mean right now I have one window open with 2 tabs and that's when I get the 234mb number. If I shut down Safari and go to those same 2 webpages then it uses nowhere near that much memory. It seems to uses more and more memory the longer I surf.

So I think it just uses memory if it's available for quicker access to previous webpages It would seem to be easy for Apple to stop Safari from using more and more memory (I can't see this being a memory leak this large and for this long on a fairly major piece of software) unless they don't need to do it because much of the memory isn't totally reserved for Safari.

[Sonicjay]

I was excited to try it on on my work PC (WinXP), however, it almost immediately bombed out trying to bring up our SharePoint Intranet site. Prompted for login, entered credentials, Safari quits. :-(

[sandbag1]

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A couple of features I'd like to see added:
- When clicking on the URL, Firefox and IE select the whole URL, Safari just inserts the cursor, you have to Ctrl-A to capture the whole URL. One-click is much easier.

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I just quickly click 3 times and the entire URL is selected. So easy. This is consistent with how it's done across all WP applications also. 1st click inserts the I-Beam, 2nd click selects the word you're clicking in, 3rd click selects the whole line.

[thompsot]

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A couple of features I'd like to see added:
- When clicking on the URL, Firefox and IE select the whole URL, Safari just inserts the cursor, you have to Ctrl-A to capture the whole URL. One-click is much easier.

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I just quickly click 3 times and the entire URL is selected. So easy. This is consistent with how it's done across all WP applications also. 1st click inserts the I-Beam, 2nd click selects the word you're clicking in, 3rd click selects the whole line.

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In Safari, since version 1 I suppose, you can click once on the icon (or white space if no icon) just to the left of the url and the whole url is selected.
As to the "why" question, my guess is that it has to do with the iPhone. There will undoubtedly be user experience enhancements like bookmark synching and transferring websites for later reading that Apple can control if they can control the browser on the computer. Also, the iPhone will make many Windows users want to have Safari for Windows. Apple certainly needs time to get bugs out before the iPhone hits the street.