The UI is quite simple, pleasing to the eye actually.  It's pretty much identical to iTunes (yeah, strange, huh?).  I like the look and feel of Safari just for the fact that it's functions are simplified, unlike Internet Explorer that buries functions deep in a hierarchal menu.  Everything you need is right there.

Bookmarks - we typically know these as "Favorites" - I personally like a lot.  It takes the same amount of clicks to access you links, so no difference there.  The way to your bookmarks is to just click the book icon and it lists all your bookmarks and bookmark folders.

If you are looking in your bookmark folders, they are automatically displayed on the right side of the screen with the URLs visible.  This is great for the times you find your duplicating bookmarks at different pages within a site.  You always know exactly where you are going.

You can also drag and drop links (like IE) into your bookmarks or links list (which is directly below the URL field.  There is also an easy "+" you can click for quick adding of bookmarks.

RSS Feeds - this is probably the one part I am not too fond of in Safari.  It took me a while to figure it out.  Unlike bookmarks, RSS feeds are not automatically imported to Safari from your Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Flock.

If you go to a site that allows RSS subscriptions, you can click the "RSS" button in the URL field and it will display the feed list, but not provide an option to subscribe.  You have to add the feed page as a bookmark.  At first I couldn't get it to work, but after reading the user guide, I found this out.  A bit of a pain, and I reported that as a bug, so hopefully that will be fixed in the full release.
Tabbed browsing browsing works the same as any other browser, except for one additional functionality:  if you drag a tab away from the tab bar, it moves the tab to a new window.  I liked this feature a lot.

Changing preferences is a simplified feature as well.  Go to Edit\\Preferences and it is a flattened menu with all the options right there.  When you click an option, it immediately changes it and if you don't like the change, uncheck it and it goes right back to the way it was.  There is no clicking "ok" 2 or 3 times like IE.  You just select what you want and it happens.  If you click outside the preferences, the changes are saved and you go back to browsing.

Another noteworthy item is that Safari can display almost all web pages exactly as they would in IE.  Firefox and Flock, for example, my Hotmail would always revert back to "classic" Hotmail format rather than the Windows Live format.  Not the case with Safari.  It looks exactly the same.

The only difference I found, was of course, with eNemesis.  In IE, if you look at the menu, you will notice it's transparent and you can see the picture behind it.  In Safari, it is not transparent, meaning you only see the menu items.  You can see the picture load initially, but when the actual menu items appear, the picture is gone.  Link said it has to do with IE Hooks.  I don't know WTF that means, but it's not a big deal to me either way.  That's the only flaw I could find.

Overall, I like Safari.  Especially the fact that I work at Microsoft and I'm using Safari out of spite.  It's entertaining, really.

If you want to see a demo or try it out, click the source link below.

Update: I found another kickass feature. You can stretch any text box to whatever size you want. So, for example, in this Blogger window I'm posting in right now, I can adjust to any size I want. I can make it stretch to full screen. Can IE do that? :)

Labels: software, technology, web development