After blasting it in my last post, I thought I might give equal time to the other side of the argument. I don't really think Safari is the world's worst browser; if I did, I wouldn't be using it right now. I just enjoy being a little hyperbolic every now and then, especially if it helps offset the overzealous Apple hype machine. Plus, I really can't see any compelling reason for someone to switch if they're already satisfied with their current browser. In reality Safari (beta versions notwithstanding) is a solid browser with both advantages and disadvantages when compared to other offerings. It's not the world's best browser by any measure other than the totally subjective view of Apple or its fanboys.

On to the good stuff.

1. 
   Inline find
   
   Now, when searching for a word in a web page, you see all occurrences at once. The entire page is darkened so that the highlighted matches jump out at you. This is excellent, and one of those forehead-slapping features that's so obviously the right way once you see it done. Opera gets it half right by highlighting all search terms at once. But when the page background is too close to the highlight color, there's nothing you can do to see them. Safari's implementation eliminates that problem.
   
2. 
   Resizing text boxes
   
   Sometimes a website doesn't really give you enough room in the textarea box to see all that you've written. Now that's not a problem: just drag the corner of any text box in any web form to resize it. Nice.
   
3. 
   
   Web inspector
   
   Ok, this is basically like Firefox's DOM Inspector, but with two nice improvements. First, the transparency is more than eye candy — it's functional by allowing you to still see the rendered page underneath that you're inspecting. And second, you can right-click on any rendered page element to bring up the inspector on that element. This is easier than Firefox's approach, which requires you to drill down through the document structure (probably not knowing it beforehand) to find the element of interest. Should be a fantastic feature for web developers.

So there you have it. I didn't even mention the flashy method of pulling a tab out into its own window (see the demo video here). As far as I can tell, that's just gratuitous Apple eye candy with no real use. It's cool, but I can't think of a situation where I'd want to do that.

Safari 3 is a beta with several vulnerabilities already documented, so proceed with caution if you decide to try it out. I don't expect it to take the world by storm, or even make a significant dent in IE or Firefox market share (which is what makes Apple's decision so puzzling; unless it's purely to provide an iPhone development platform on Windows), but I suppose I'll continue using it. For now, anyway.