Links Safari.

Apple announced the public beta of their OS X browser Safari with much buzz and less then stellar reviews.

• CNET : Apple Computer's Safari browser offers little challenge to Microsoft's browser dominance, analysts said Tuesday, but the Mac maker could benefit enormously if it can wean itself from Internet Explorer.
• Mark Pilgrim I’ve downloaded and installed Safari. This review is mainly for web designers who now need to support yet another browser. It is in no way a judgement on Apple. All browsers have bugs, and all web designers need to know about them. Dave Hyatt, one of Safari's developers, responds here looking for test cases.
• Mena Trott: My initial response is this: Safari's bookmark and history management, the Google bar and spell checking are the three biggest gains for my own use. The inability to turn off anti-aliasing text really puts me off, however (like previous versions of Chimera, we may be able to fix this by editing the preferences file -- wherever that may be).
• Ben Hammersley: Sadly, at first glance it's shit almost-shit - No tabbed browsing.
• Anil Dash: Today [Apple] launched Safari, which is a Gecko (Mozilla engine) browser that loses Chimera's tabs and adds brushed metal ugliness. Maybe the tabs will show up when the browser's out of beta.
• Scott Andrew: It's too bad that Safari identifies itself as Mozilla/Gecko, when in fact its rendering engine is based on that of Konqueror. There's going to be a lot of confused user-agent sniffers out there. A lesson, I suppose, on the perils of trusting the USER_AGENT string, and other spoofable HTTP headers.
• Ben Hammersley (again): In what must be the fastest, most in-depth, distributed product review in history, Apple's new browser, Safari is being bashed about all over the blogosphere. Last night I was less than overwhelmed, but this morning I'm a little more happy.

Apple's use of the Konqueror/KHTML rendering engine as opposed to Mozilla Gecko is a bit controversial (or more accurately intriguing), but in the long run will be beneficial to the space. Instead of one open source engine, developers will have more choice and the inherent flexibility that two different efforts provide. There is some valid concern that another engine will divide the efforts of the community and introduce additional quirks and standards incompatibilities for designers concerned with universal access to work around. With Apple's support and dedication, I'm optimistic that those issues will be surmounted -- take David Hyatt and quick and open response to the community's feedback.

The 17 inch monitor PowerBook Jobs introduced is rather awkward looking. While its only an inch thick, the length and width in addition to all of the dead space around the keyboard reminds me of the old school laptops that that where the size of a suitcase.

I'm still resolved to follow through on my resolution. With reviews like InfoWorld's who wouldn't? I don't think the jumbo screen model is for me though.

[UPDATE: I've made a post to my O'Reilly weblog based on this one here. (The comments board is open.)