I have decided to make the switch from Google Chrome 5 to Apple's Safari 5 just yesterday. Even though there isn't any extensions yet, there are some available on an unofficial Safari Extensions Tumblr page that work pretty well. Google Chrome has been a bit irritating lately, and even though it's a hair faster than Safari, Google Chrome 5 seems to be the worst release ever. It's been crashing every so often, and even though it's come a long way from Chrome 1.0, we'll see if 6.0 will convince me to make the switch back. Anyways, now that I have Safari 5 on Windows 7, I'm happy to do a hands on review.

First impression you'll see is that it has a very plain design. The whole color scheme is basically a light gray and a darker charcoal gray. It's not really my favorite, I like Chrome better. I'm sure on a Mac it looks much better, but it's not really doing much for the Windows environment. I appreciate, though, how Apple seems to aim for simple and sleek rather than Google's approach on just dead simple. The startup time to load the browser is a few seconds behind Chrome as well. So, overall speed of Safari on Windows 7 is just a tiny bit behind Chrome, but not slow enough to be incredibly noticeable.

What to Dislike. Back to extensions support, the main extensions gallery doesn't launch until later this summer. It's kind of like launching a half-assed product, so I'm banking on the extensions gallery to be better than expected when finally launched. Also, I don't like how (on Windows 7 only) that if Safari is pinned to the taskbar, it still creates a new Safari icon when the browser is launched (see photo to right), so right now as I type this I have two Safari icons on my taskbar. Not cool. Another thing I noticed is that performance can be slow when I'm loading multiple tabs at once. If I load the browser and quickly launch Facebook, Twitter, and Feedly all at once, it slows down a little bit. I'm hoping for that to be fixed in an upcoming update.