I've been a Mac user for a while and a Mac fanboy for about as long as I can remember (minus the Mac OS 9 years). That being said I was really excited when Safari was released. At the time there weren't really any options for web browsers on OS X. There was Opera which was still $$$ at that time, a really bad release of Netscape and Internet Explorer. Personally I was an IE user and it was painful. The browser crashed left and right (like I was running OS 9), was slow to render, and had horrible standards support (worse than IE for Windows if that's possible). Then along came Safari and everything seemed wonderful. It was a few orders of magnitude faster than IE, didn't crash on crazy Javascript pages. All was good..for a while.

Years later it seems that the "newness" of Safari has worn off. It lacks the standards support found in Firefox 2.0 and is slow to load. Worse yet, it crashes left and right. I had pretty much given up on Safari until I tried a nightly build of Webkit. Webkit is the GUI from Safari in Tiger mixed with the rendering engine (Webkit) from Leopard. It's amazing. It's rock solid, fast, and has amazing standards support. Firefox seems painful after using Webkit. My favorite feature at the moment is it's PDF support. It used to be that Safari downloaded the PDF and displaying a blank page by default, and if you loaded Acrobat Reader you go to wait an eternity while the plugin loaded the application in the background. The whole thing seemed silly for an OS that integrates PDFs so wonderfully. Now in Webkit the PDFs simple render in a window as if you had Acrobat Reader loaded, but without the painful load time. This alone had made Webkit my browser of choice. I'm looking forward to the final release of Safari using the new Webkit engine in Leopard later this year.