Baumblog EST 1968 - A blog for the Baumbachs who originated in Syracuse, NY

I know there's only two lucky members of this family to be running Mac OS X, but now you too can join the Apple family and realize what it's like to use excellent software.

Today, Apple announced they will be releasing Apple's Safari web browser for Windows. In fact, you can go grab yourself a copy at http://www.apple.com/safari.

So you're saying to yourself, why? Well it's twice as fast as Internet Explorer 7 to start. But ok, you're on the geek wave and already use Mozilla Firefox. Good for you, now get a real browser. Safari for Windows (Which is in beta right now) is 1.6 times faster than Firefox. That's still impressive.

I'm writing this post right now in Safari for Windows, I suggest you go get yourself a copy.

GJ said 3 minutes later

So, what are the tradeoffs? Anybody who uses Mozilla will tell you that not EVERY site supports it--I expect to see more of the same with Safari. Any other blemishes?

I'm also interested in memory usage--how does it compare? IE is a hog, but even Firefox can get bloaty at times.
Geoff said 34 minutes later

If a website cannot support FireFox and/or Safari, then you shouldn't be viewing it. Obviously it was designed by idiots, for idiots.

-Your fellow website genius
Marc said 34 minutes later

Safari and Firefox appear to be sharing similar memory footprints. I have three tabs open in both. The three tabs are Pandora playing a radio station, a small HTML local page, and the Baumblog. Safari appears to use a bit more memory (100mb vs 80mb).

The one thing Apple software tends to do is use memory very efficiently. Often times applications try to keep memory usage down, which is good when there's a lot of applications in need of it. Apple's software will give up memory if it's low on the system, but when there is plenty of memory, it will use as much as possible. This is good, because memory is WAY faster than swapping on the hard drive. (Please note, as I'm typing this in Safari, the memory usage has peaked at 100mb, Firefox for some reason has decided to use 10mb more and I don't have it in the foregroud).

You'll still need to keep IE7 around since some people like to make their websites IE only, or god forbid, require ActiveX. In terms of websites that Safari supports, it's very much the same as Firefox. When I'm on my Mac, everything works but the IE7 only sites, where even Firefox won't help me out.

Keep in mind, this is a public beta, just released literally 30 minutes ago. It's going to have quirks here and there, so any silly issues will be worked out in the next couple months, but just give the browser a try. You can put it down until it's officially released, but try it now and see how fast and nice it is.
GJ said about 1 hour later

Dude, I use Opera. :) Default browser on the Wii.
GJ said about 5 hours later

Safari doesn't work with Yahoo Mail Beta.
Marc said about 6 hours later

Nope, but Yahoo Mail beta is probably the second worst web application written in the history of time. Second only to MySpace. It is the slowest AJAX mail client I've seen so far, especially since they integrated the chat system into it now. Use Gmail :)
Kristen said 1 day later

I have to say, Gmail sucks Marc. It may have a lot of space, but you can't create folders, and when you write back and forth with someone it doesn't come in as a new email, it goes into the same email link. that makes it so easy to miss a response! If you try to put a message into the saved file, and delete it from your regular inbox, it erases both. That's crap.
We use Gmail with our company, and we all hate it. I don't think it's user friendly. The only thing I like about it is the star feature. I wish we had picked something else. I hope they update it.
Marc said 1 day later

Do you know about Labels Kristen? Labels are the exact same thing as a folder, except they act more like the tags feature on this blog. You can associate an e-mail with multiple labels. So for instance, your company could assign a label of "New Orders" and "Orders" to a brand new order that came in through the website. Then you could log into Gmail and click on the New Orders label and see which orders are new and in progress. Once that order has shipped, you could then delete the label New Orders on that e-mail and bam, it's out of the "New Orders" queue. That's pretty neat.

Once you have tagged/labeled things the way you like in your Inbox, you should "Archive" them. That hides them from the inbox but makes them visible from the Labels associated with it.

As for missing responses, you shouldn't have that problem. When a new message comes in, it stays with its "conversation", which is basically just the history of e-mails going back and forth. But it is also bold, so you should be able to see new e-mails. Also, if you want, check out Gmail Notifier. That will install an application on your computer that will popup a notification whenever new e-mails come in.

If you want, I can write up a blog post about using GMail in detail and some of its power. I agree, some of the terms are new and not quite obvious (Google isn't the best at usability, they're all about minimalist approach while keeping a high degree of functionality), but once you get the hang of it, you'll be begging for some of these features in other applications.

Also, in case you still hate it, GMail offers pop access, which means virtually any other e-mail reader could be used to read your e-mail sent to GMail. That way you don't have to change your e-mail address and you can use whatever e-mail client you want.
Marc said 1 day later

And if you still hate GMail AND your mail client doesn't offer pop access (I don't think Yahoo does or Hotmail...not sure, both suck), you can setup GMail to forward your e-mail to another e-mail address.
GJ said 1 day later

A Gmail walkthrough might be cool. I don't use it much today, but I think that's more because no spambots have discovered it yet. A demo of the features might not only convince several of us to cut over to it (for crying out loud, I still use mail.com which really, really SUX!), but it will probably land the blog yet another Google Alert.