Having just acquired the phone, and having finally upgraded to Leopard last weekend, I started using Safari a little to get some bookmarks I wanted on the iPhone. It seemed pretty snappy, although I wasn’t really putting it through any grueling paces. Since I was going through the trouble of upgrading my computer, I decided to go ahead and do some early spring cleaning as well, cutting files and unused applications, and applying a draconian filter to my process of eliminating music from my machine. (down to about 22gb of music on an 80gb drive – I promise I am trying) One BIG target for trimming on my machine was my Windows XP virtual machine that I run through Fusion. Fusion has come a long way since I started at VmWare, and I have to say, its a pretty great product (no I can’t claim any credit, wrong group). I use this VM everyday at work developing and testing WebAccess (beta 2 just released last Friday), but I swear, for a fairly basic installation, it was taking up nearly 10gb of space on my drive. I was running some tests with a slim XP vm that ran at about 3gb or so (see the article on LifeHacker: http://lifehacker.com/374376/trim-down-windows-to-the-bare-essentials). This slim vm also happened to have Safari 3 (and every other browser you might want to run tests with) installed on it, and since we recently got WebAccess running well on Safari I thought I would give it a spin. I was pretty amazed at what I found.
I ran some comparisons of Safari 3 running WebAccess *in a VM* on my MacBook against Firefox 2 running in OSX. I had heard Safari was fast, but I didn’t really believe the hype, and I figured that Safari on Windows would probably be relegated to the land of second class software, like IE always was on the Mac. In all the operations managing a Server 2.0 instance, Safari was by far faster, and in most cases was nearly 3 times faster than Firefox 2. I know that Firefox 3 is supposed to be fast also, but from what I’ve seen so far its still fairly buggy.
This got me re-evaluating what to use for my daily browsing. I’ve been using Camino, which I switched to because it used the Gecko rendering engine, but was an OSX native application, so it played (more) nicely in the Mac environment. I had originally switched to Firefox a few years ago because it was the better alternative on the Mac, and well, out of principal, because it wasn’t Safari. However, the speed of 3.0 and integration with my new mobile device has got me using it again. Now if only delicious played better with iPhone…