Safari for Windows, RMLSWeb.com and Firefox

Along with my previous post discussing iPhone, Leopard and iChat, Apple also announced the release of their web browsing software, Safari for Windows. Being such a long-time internet user, I have used many different web browsers, so I was more than happy to put Safari for Windows through some tests. I will also be giving my take on web browsers and RMLSWeb.com

Safari for Windows
It sure looks nice! Safari for Mac has gained 5% market share, so this isn’t necessarily little news. As a web developer, I love this. Before, I had to have friends with Macs test my site, but now I can do it on my own. As an educator of real estate professionals, I let out a moan. Another browser that I have to deal with on a daily basis that people just downloaded because they heard it was the latest and greatest when they are more comfortable with IE. They’re claiming a 2x speed increase over IE and about a 1.6x increase over Firefox. In my tests, it definitely is faster than IE, but Firefox is almost identical, depending on the site. Not enough of an advantage to get me to switch to Safari for my daily browsing needs.
RMLSWeb.com
Still won’t work on Safari. Here’s the interesting thing: RMLSWeb.com will work perfectly fine on Firefox. This may be difficult to fathom because if you try logging in to RMLSWeb.com with Firefox, it will tell you it’s not compatible. That’s one of the beauties of Firefox – I loaded up an extension called “User-Agent Switcher” that tricks the web site into thinking I’m using a different browser. So I told RMLSWeb.com that I was using IE 5.01 (okay, this is the really sad part, IE version 6 has been around since 2001, but according to RMLSWeb.com it’s not officially supported) and RMLSWeb.com loaded perfectly fine – IN FIREFOX. They just don’t “officially support” Firefox. So why do they block it entirely? Because they don’t want to help the Realtors who pay them money or allow Realtors a choice in the matter. I’m assuming that RMLSWeb.com would actually probably work nearly flawlessly in Safari, but we won’t know until RMLS.com is seriously revised.
Firefox
If you haven’t tried Firefox, you really should. It’s faster than IE, it can be fully customized to your needs via extensions and themes, and it’s easy to use. Right now, almost 25% of the world population is using Firefox, so it’s well into the mainstream. The best thing about Firefox for Realtors is that you can get an extension called “IE Tab”. This will allow any sites you specify (RMLSWeb.com?) to load in an IE Tab. Not an IE window. You don’t even really open IE at all. It just turns your tab within Firefox into an IE tab, so RMLSWeb.com works perfectly fine. The other necessary add-in for Firefox is the Firefox Preloader. This makes Firefox load initially much faster than the default program. This makes it right around the same speed to start as IE. So as fast as IE to start, faster than Safari for Windows to start, faster than IE to load pages and the same speed as Safari for Windows to load pages makes Firefox the best all-around browser for PC’s and Realtors. It can be downloaded from my tools page.