For anyone who has been as disenchanted with Vista as I have become (more on this later - maybe), and who also got their copy of Vista preloaded on a computer, and who’s copies of Vista are Ultimate or Business, then you’re in luck. Microsoft and it’s partners (read as computer manufacturers) are in some cases allowing customers to downgrade to Windows XP. You can find out more details here.

How generic a title is that? Yes, Apple has released Safari (and I know I’m behind the curve on this) for Windows. You can pick up your public beta release here and you can find plugins here.

Quick First Impressions:

System requirements are quite hefty (compared to Firefox):

For instance, while it automatically imports your Favorites and Bookmarks, you can’t automatically get to them without going into a kind of bookmarks manager (again, comparing to Firefox) page, clicking on a link here will take you to a new website, but I have to right click and choose “Open in new tab” to get a fresh tab view of the link as opposed to using the middle click or scroll wheel click open a new tab. Just small stuff like that really…

I like the RSS icon (see screen shot) in the address bar and the ability to view the feed directly in the browser.

It automatically loaded the network settings (maybe pulled in from IE? or is using windows settings?), which is useful if you’re on a corporate network or behind a proxy service.

Quick Conclusions

All in all, just another browser for Windows. It doesn’t cover any new ground, and I really doubt it’ll set the web on fire any time soon, but nice to play with something new every once in a while…

Wow! Microsoft apparently made available two vhd files available back in April with pre-activated Windows XP SP2 and either IE 6 or IE 7 for testing websites with the browsers. If you want your’s you’d better get it quick, the images expire on August 17th, 2007. I’m downloading my now, so I’ll see what you’re able to do with them in a bit…

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