Five Reasons to Love Safari 3

Today at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Steve Jobs announced the release of Safari 3. It’s a great update to the browser, which was last released in 2005.

I’m still committed to Firefox, but I’ll give Safari an occasional spin. When it has the same plugin capability as Firefox I will gladly reconsider. If you are considering a switch today, here are five reasons to make the change:

1. It’s available for the PC. Wow; I should have seen that coming. It makes perfect sense considering that millions of iPhones will be connecting to PCs in the next few months.
2. It’s super fast. Safari loads pages up to 2 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2.0.
3. Private browsing. Flip a switch and Safari will not retain any of your Google searches, cookies, history of downloads or pages viewed, or form information.
4. Font smoothing. Great for designers, really bad for readability and usability. Fortunately smoothing can turned off through the panel at Edit > Preferences > Appearance.
5. Windows Media support. Are publishers still using this format? It’s comforting that Apple is at least playing fairly.