I was among the first wave of people who downloaded the Safari 3 Beta for Windows yesterday. My first impressions were deluded a bit by my poor-performing machine, but generally I’m pretty impressed. The rendering is pretty fast and its memory footprint is pretty small compared to the other browsers running on my machine. I left Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Safari running on my machine overnight, here’s the memory usage:

• Firefox – 245 MB
• Opera – 67 MB
• Internet Explorer – 58 MB
• Safari – 21 MB

It’s worth noting that Safari also takes up less memory than Outlook, the Yahoo! Widget Engine, and Microsoft Word.

Since Safari 3 is built on the latest WebKit builds (522), it has tons of bug fixes and great DOM support. I’m excited to see all the things I’ll be able to do once I get under the hood.

The parts I don’t like: it doesn’t feel Windows-native. Firefox took a lot of heat for not making their Mac version feel like a Mac app, and Safari is doing the same thing on Windows. I hate that I have to go to the lower-right corner to resize the window and the font smoothing drives me nuts. I find it very hard to read and it tends to make things blurry.

Overall, though, I think it’s a step in the right direction. I always felt this day was inevitable, and I’m glad it’s finally here.

Disclaimer: Any viewpoints and opinions expressed in this article are those of Nicholas C. Zakas and do not, in any way, reflect those of my employer, my colleagues, Wrox Publishing, O'Reilly Publishing, or anyone else. I speak only for myself, not for them.