Thursday, June 14, 2007

Apple Safari Beta Gets Lost in the Weeds

I decided to try out Apple's new beta version of Safari for Windows (Safari is Apple's Web browser that was previously only available on the Mac). After hearing good things, I downloaded and installed it on my PC, which is a beefy Dell Latitude D620 with a dual-core processor and 2GB of RAM--more than exceeding the stated minimum requirements to run the browser.

The install was fairly quick and simple, and after the install was complete, I rebooted my PC just to make sure that everything installed cleanly.

After the reboot was completed, I launched Safari with great anticipation....and that's where my excitement rapidly deteriorated into despair. Safari opened a browser window and then got stuck--nothing displayed on the screen, and no controls worked in the browser. After a few minutes, I noticed my laptop beginning to get slower and slower, and a quick check of the Windows task manager confirmed that Safari was using 100% of one of my processors (apparently it isn't capable of leveraging multiple processors)--and it was also gobbling up RAM at a prodigious rate. I finally killed the process after it had used up over 500MB of RAM--and the browser was still unresponsive.

Just for grins, I uninstalled, rebooted, and reinstalled--with the same result.

So far, it looks like I'm going to be staying with Firefox--at least until Safari finds its way out of the weeds!

~

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