Let's just say I am not impressed. The first time I used Safari was on a Mac, and I was actually quite impressed. It was fast, clean, and somehow exciting.

Fast forward a couple years, I'm reading my daily feeds in the blogosphere and Scoble posts about the new Safari for Windows. I sit back and ponder, "Hmm, this could be interesting."

So I download the exe, run the install, and fire it up. And I wait. And wait and wait. It takes 28 seconds before I see a UI, and another 25+ seconds before it finishes loading. Subsequent runs the UI shows up in less than 2 seconds, but it still takes 27 seconds to load the default page.

The first thing I notice is that all the non-image text is, um, missing. See screenshot below. This is a big WTF?! Maybe it has something to do with Safari not using the default Windows fonts, as Scoble mentioned? Unfortunately, I cannot get to experience the font rendering differences.

Well, let me see if I can get something out of it without text. I immediately hit the maximize button, and the application disappears. What? Maybe it crashed? I check the taskbar, but it's still there, though not called Safari as I'd expect. It seems that whenever I maximize the window in my second monitor, it moves it way into the third monitor position, and I don't have a third monitor. I have to right-click on the taskbar item and choose Move to bring it back. It does maximize correctly on the main monitor.

Another annoyance is that it somehow blocks my auto-hide taskbar from appearing when my cursor hits the bottom of the screen in the main monitor.

The final thing I'll mention is that sometimes it seems to hang, and it won't let me right-click the taskbar item and close it (using the Windows key to get there). This is a problem with the auto-hide taskbar sometimes, but the other items are working correctly. It appears as though Safari has some 'extra' logic to 'help' it maintain focus.

For the record, I am running Windows 2003 Server on my laptop, which is not one of the 'targeted' platforms, but I have never had much problem getting 'XP targeted' apps to work on it before.

I'd say Apple has some work to do before I'll be replacing any testing machines. It is only beta 3; maybe RTM version 2 or 3 will work better.