Anyone else have problems with that 'crazy fast' version of Safari?

I was pretty excited to read over the weekend my colleague Seth Weintraub's blog about the coming speed increases in Apple's Safari Web browser. Excited enough to download the test builds of WebKit, Apple's name for pre-beta versions of Safari. It was a frustrating experience for a non-developer, non-command-line-aficionado such as myself.

Following the detailed instructions at Apple's WebKit Web site, I downloaded and installed Visual C++ 2005 Express, the Windows Platform SDK, the Cygwin source code manager, and the QuickTime SDK onto my Windows XP ThinkPad.

I had to clear more than 5 GB from my hard drive to make enough room for all of these files. The whole process took more than an hour.

I was then ready to build and run WebKit. Except that I wasn't. When I tried to check out the WebKit source tree by typing "svn checkout http://svn.webkit.org/repository/webkit/trunk WebKit" Cygwin gave me this message "bash: svn: command not found". Evidently, Cygwin wasn't installed properly. I re-installed that and the Windows SDK again, and also made sure to add the folder path for Visual C++ 2005 Express. But still no go. By this time, I'd invested about 3 hours.

I ended up downloading the latest version of Safari 3 beta, version 3.0.4. I had used Safari 3 for several weeks last summer. While I was impressed by the faster page rendering, I, like many others, was turned off by the fuzzy fonts, the result of Apple eschewing Microsoft's ClearType technology. I felt like I was 12 again, when my slipping vision caused me to be unable to read the blackboard clearly.

This latest beta of Safari was as fast as I remembered it. But the fuzzy text remained. Moreover, I initially couldn't read what my bookmarks or tabs were, due to their fuzziness and lack of contrast with the toolbar's gunmetal grey background.

As the contrast and brightness on my 19-inch KDS CRT were already set to 100%, I pumped up all three color levels (red, green, blue) to 90%. That made the toolbar text legible, though still hard to read.

Safari today is not fast enough for me to switch off Firefox. But if it's really going to become 2.5 times faster, then I'll probably switch - fuzzy text and all.

So when will that be? The Surfin' Safari blog doesn't say. The best guess, according to Weintraub, is sometime this summer, about the time Apple should also release its 3G iPhone. Such a device will really be able to take advantage of a super-fast Safari.

See also: Seth Weintraub: Safari is about to get crazy fast