We have a twiddle with Apple's Vista Surfari

It's a beta and features such betazoid features as a total inability to save any changes to preferences (at least when running under Vista), possibly due to the absence of a 'save' button on any of the preferences dialogues.

Other star missing features include the lack of an option to save a tab group as the home page, a useful tool that even Internet Exploder has had for years. Worse still, it's the most boring-looking application since WordPerfect for DOS - and even that had a bit of colour.

Dull enough for ya?

The inability to save changes to preferences means you're stuck with the gushing Apple start page which carries a constant and depressing reminder of just how bad the musical taste of iTunes users really is. Resizing the browser window's a bit of a challenge for Windows users as it uses a non-standard format that doesn't let you click and drag the window borders to resize the thing - you have to use a little tag in the bottom right hand corner instead. Why produce a Windows version of a piece of software and not do it properly? Even Adobe does a better job.

Still, we'll give it a try for a bit, but at the moment it ain't looking too clever, despite Saint Steve of Cupertino's nebulous claim that it runs a zillion times faster than IE7. Not on this 2GB 2.7GHz Core 2 Duo under Vista Ultimate it doesn't.

Surfari imports favourites from IE and Firefox, but displays them in a format that could be most kindly described as unimaginative and more realistically as appallingly-dull. Font handling on a CRT display is extraordinarily bad at the default smoothing settings - to which the browser automatically reverts due to its inability to save changes to preferences. Maybe it looks better on one of those modern flat screen wossnames. It could hardly be worse.

So why has Apple produced what is - at the moment at least - possibly the most crap browser on the planet? The clue's on that unavoidable start page and it's called iTunes. Apple's future is based on selling content, not computers.

At start, Surfari eats 66MB of memory. Firefox eats 33MB. Both will bloat as pages load.

But perhaps the saddest thing of all is that Apple's hyper-cool Californian marketing dudes failed to name the browser Surfari, after the '60s Californian band. Still, we'll do what we can to rectify that.

If you feel like making your desktop a more depressing place, you can download the beta from Apple's pastel-hued Web site here ?