Ahhh, come on, you have to be joking. Safari is one of the worst browsers out there. It crashes regularly. It can't render many sites properly. It also is querky in the way it renders a page. The dimensions keep changing and gui elements move around until the page is fully rendered.
By contrast, firefox on the mac, and IE on windows are both faster. Rendered pages are mapped out first and then gui elements are rendered but they don't constantly resize while rendering. They also handle more websites correctly and play more embedded video / audio.
Apple has fallen behind in the browser area. I for one would like to see a complete re-make of safari with a user friendly Apple flair.
I've been a dedicated Firefox user for a few years now. I've got both a Mac (PowerMac Dual 553 G4 with 512 ram running Tiger on my primary hard drive with Leopard on a 2nd drive but so far too slow with my current graphics card (ancient Rage 128) and/or CPU compared to Tiger for my tastes for me to switch to on a daily basis; I'm ordering a newer graphics card and will retry then) and a PC (AMD64 5600+, 2 gigs ram, 7900GS graphics) that is dual-booting XP SP2 and Linux, networked together.
My conclusions are this after trying Safari 3.0 on Tiger, IE7 on Windows and Firefox on my old Win98 machine (PIII 1GHz), the current PC with both WinXP and Linux and under MacOSX Tiger:
1> Firefox is about the same speed on my Dual 553 G4 Mac as it was on my old 1GHz PIII Win98 machine. Given the CPU power for a single G4 there (Firefox is single threaded), that makes sense.
2> IE7 is WAY better than I ever expected given how much I hated IE5 and IE6. It is also multi-threaded and therefore not prone to the massive slow-down freezes Firefox has on bad behaving javascript pages (e.g. blogs).
3> Safari 3.0 WIPES THE FLOOR with Firefox 2.0.11. It is SO much faster on my Mac than Firefox that it's not even funny. In fact, it's almost as fast as Firefox is on my AMD 5600+ (on either XP or Linux)! I've heard rumors Safari 3.x may be multi-threaded for tabs, at least. I can't confirm that offhand, but I know it's the fastest of all the browsers I've tried and it's blatantly obvious on this Mac G4, which isn't exactly up to date in terms of CPU speed. In short, it makes this Mac a VERY usable Internet machine. M$ Office 2004 and file serving duties along with nice X11 integration with Linux on my other machine (I mostly use XP for playing games). I HAVE seen Safari crash, but overall it's been pretty darn stable here (no worse than Firefox which I've also seen crash numerous times and which seems to have a really bad/slow memory leak(s) in it as it becomes unstable over time until it crashes and/or needs reloaded).
I'm not sure if this machine (short of upgrading the CPU at which point I might as well go get a newer desktop Mac) will ever run Leopard to the point where I feel like running it on a daily basis (Leopard seems like a downgrade to me whereas all prior updates of MacOSX seemed FASTER, but then the graphics card is so crappy on this Mac, it might just need a cheap Radeon7500 or something to make it compete with Tiger as really only the GUI animations stuff is the only thing that really feels 'slow' on it. I simply have had no need for 3D on the mac given its lack of gaming capability regardless). So I hope Apple continues to update Safari 3.x for Tiger for awhile as technically, their own installer doesn't even support this Mac for Leopard (easy enough to get around it using a simple Open Firmware fake out command, though).
I do love Firefox's free extension capability (I wish more other than Adblock were available for Safari), but at least on this older Mac, the speed improvements over Firefox are worth the slight shortcomings. Ironically, if Apple drops support for Safari for Tiger, they would have removed the fastest quality browser there is for older Macs that aren't supported in Leopard anymore (although you might be surprised how fast Firefox will run on it through X11 networking...i.e. having the PC do the CPU lifting and letting the mac act as an X11 terminal. Heck, maybe I'm too geeky with the Linux/X11 stuff to really appreciate a straight use Mac. I'm compiling Firefox-X11 for Apple's X11 right now to test its speed out. I already installed KDE 3.5.8 on the Mac to connect to the Linux box and play with X11 across the network).
