digitalBush

The blogosphere is on fire with this news, so I have to put in my 2 Lincolns.  First, let me preface this "review" by asking a question.  Why?  I'm not sure of the answer. As a web developer, Apple just took away my only reason to consider purchasing a mac.  Now I can see how that 2-3% of the browser share can see my web sites just fine on my Windows machines. 

The install went smooth.  I'm not too thrilled about the extras it wanted to install.  Bonjour?  No thanks.  After I unchecked a few boxes, it went right on and opened up with no problems on my Vista machine at work.  The first thing that jumped to me is how nasty the fonts looked on my machine.  I dug around the preferences and adjusted the font smoothing, but nothing really helped.  They had 3 choices nasty, nastier, and nastier still.  However, at home on my XP machine with a 17" CRT, the font rendering looks acceptable. Not great, just acceptable. 

The next thing I noticed is well, it looks like a mac.  It looks totally out of place on a windows machine.  I'm not surprised because I use iTunes and the experience is the same.  It's not a bad thing, it just takes some getting used to.  It's smart on Apple's part because it's better branding for them.  In fact, it's not so different from these crazy looking Live apps that Microsoft keeps putting out. 

The animations are choppy.  This could be because both of the machines I've run this on aren't exactly cutting edge.  I hate animations anyway, so it would be great if I could turn that off.  Also, a tiny annoyance is the crappy looking RSS icon.  What's wrong with the standard feed icon?  Firefox uses it, and it looks nice.  Hell, IE7 even uses it.

This is a beta product, so please take my criticism with a grain of salt.  It lives up to their claims of speed.  I'm not sure that it will ever pry me away from Firefox.  I can't live without the web developer toolbar and firebug.  On the positive side, my web site renders great in Safari and my jQuery plugins seem to work just fine. Sweet.