Global Warming is really on - the browsers wars are getting hotter.

I worked with Safari on an iMac many summers ago to test a web application as the project's SLA required strict cross-browser compatibility. Of what I remember from that experience, I had to do a good deal of tweaking & implementing CSS hacks to make the application work fine all across.

I was surprised to read from Scott Hanselman's blog posting today that a Windows version of Safari (v3 Public Beta) is out and my first thought was - What is the need?

If I can confirm that the behavior of web pages is the same for the Mac & Windows versions of Safari, I would probably use it when I'm testing for strict cross browser compatibility without requiring a Mac.

A few things I noticed:

• Although the Safari 3 Public Beta Download page does not explicitly say it, it works on Windows 2000.
  
• Safari Auto-Suggests URLs.
  
• Unlike IE, Firefox, Opera which have a Tools option in the menu & Options/Preferences under it, Safari has Preferences under Edit.
  
• I could not get Edit > Spelling > "Check Spelling While Typing" to work. Although I selected the option, I had no way of knowing if it was activated at all.
  
• The "Find As You Type" feature that (I think) Firefox pioneered comes at the top instead of the bottom as in Firefox and shows all matches. I found it a bit obtrusive in Safari as it grays out the page & highlights matching words.
  
• A first time user wouldn't know what Snapback is until he searches for it or reads about "12 reasons you'll love Safari" on the Safari home page. It is a feature that helps you to navigate back to the original page after you have gone deep into several pages from that page through hyperlinks. You have to click on the orange SnapBack icon that appears in the address bar or inline Google Search bar to SnapBack.
  
• When you access secure websites the lock icon appears at the top right corner.
  
• Safari does not give any kind of indication if it encounters a Javascript error in a web page.There is no option like Tools > Error Console as in Firefox to check the error or the warning icon in the status bar as in IE.
  
• While many of the demos of controls in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit worked fine, the Calendar, AutoComplete control demos didn't work on Safari (3 Public Beta).