Claimed to be 3x faster than FireFox and 5x faster than Opera, Safari 3.1 is now available for Mac and PC as a free download.

And there’s also a stand alone donwloadable Tiger version which was near impossible to find with the previous version of Safari, not so good for anyone who may have damaged or erased Safari 3.

I have been using Safari 3.1 for a few days now and so far it’s stable and fast, not a single issue.

You can get Safari 3.1 for Mac and PC here

Safari comes with OSX and is a fantastic browser from Apple….but I’ve been finding lately that Safari has been a little slow on my Powerbook (which is 3 years old so not unexpected). So I switched to Firefox and found it to be a little faster but slower than I’d like or expect…despite the fact that this laptop has 768mb of ram and is a 1.33ghz G4. I don’t really want to spring for more ram (which would cost about $150 for the necessary module) with the ever present rumours of Apple working on a new sub-notebook. I’d love a 10″MacBook…which means it probably won’t happen.

So what to do? I decided to try Camino. I’ve used it before on my iMac, mostly as a third browser to test sites with and confirm that caching isn’t in effect while working on something. There have been a number of articles recently about Safari’s sluggishness and ways of speeding up OSX surfing so it seemed like a good place to start.

So far it’s pretty peppy and as good or better than Firefox performance on this machine. Another nice benefit is the fact that Wordpress (the system we use to post here on Switching to Mac) and a few other things work the way you’d expect them to under Camino - including Google Docs & Spreadsheets which doesn’t currently work with Safari.

It’s not perfect. Some things don’t render properly - but that is mostly sloppy coding’s fault on some websites. It also doesn’t handle RSS feeds at all (compared to Safari’s great RSS support) but it’s free and is updated pretty regularly.

If you’ve got an older machine, or if you want to try something different, try it out and see if it runs things a little better…give it a shot and post your experiences here.