i have scaled these city walls

So Apple released a Safari 3 beta for Windows. A guy over at Wired wants to know who in their right mind would run Safari on Windows, and I can see his point. Right mind or not, though, I installed it and have been playing with it a little, and it doesn't seem like the crappy Safari he's talking about. It's a nice browser as far as I can tell, faster than Firefox or IE7, and pretty; the text box I'm typing in right now has that glowing blue outline that puts Mac users everywhere at ease, safe in the knowledge that technology is gentle and welcoming and made just for them.

But it's not the panacea browser I'm hoping for. These days I use three browsers, each for different reasons. Opera is my default; it doesn't cover all my needs because of compliance issues, but it's fast and lightweight and has cool and useful features like speed dial, a page of 9 thumbnails of the sites I visit most often. But it won't work very well for baseball sites or the Continental employee reservation pages. IE7 is the only browser Quickbooks will let me use, so there's no getting away from it, but otherwise I can take it or leave it. Baseball radio broadcasts stream well enough, but no better than Firefox. Firefox has some great plugins like the one that lets me see thumbnails of Google search results, and it will search text while I type (Opera does too, and more elegantly at that), but it's bloated and slow to load.

And Safari comes up short in a few places, too: I can't open a new tab by double-clicking the tab bar, I can't enable pop-ups for specific sites (which means no baseball audio feeds without opening my whole browser up to pop-ups telling me that if the link is flashing I've won something special), and I can't search for text as I type. And it's got that stupid Apple thing going on that only lets me resize the window from the bottom right corner instead of any window edge, which is especially annoying when a link opens in a new window that's halfway off my screen, so I have to pull it up first and then resize it. Why would anybody want that?

I could go on about this stuff but it'd be even more boring than it already is, but the short of it is that Safari is nice but it won't replace anything for me and I don't relish the idea of using yet another browser in addition to the other three. Can't someone just make a browser that is fast, lightweight, has the features I want, and works with all the sites I need it to work with?