Safari on Windows: Bonjour Slowing Down MS Office

I installed Safari on a spare WinXP laptop that I had lying around in the office. I only played with it few minutes, but I already noticed stuff I didn’t like.

The laptop I used was a fresh windows install with Office 2003, Norton Internet Security 2006 and not much else. It had 512 MB RAM and a 1.5 GHz CPU. The browser was sluggish. When I typed in a URL and pressed enter, the UI would seize up for a second or two, until the page loaded. It was annoying. Of course this could be cause by NIS doing something weird in the background, but still. Neither IE nor Firefox ever exhibited this type of behavior. Anyone experienced anything similar?

I agreed to install the Bonjour service along with the browser. Maybe it was a mistake. I suspect that this piece of software caused really long delays when opening MS office applications. After I installed Safari, MS Word, Excel and Outlook would spend 30 seconds or up to a minute showing me the splash screen. I’m guessing that Bonjour was trying to add/modify printers in the Office panels and either wan unable to, or was being denied network access by NIS. Either way, the time to start any Office application became equivalent to that annoying network timeout delay you experience each time you try to add a network printer to your system. In other words it was unbearable.

Uninstalling Safari fixed this problem. After it was gone from the system Office applications started opening normally – which in my case was almost instantly, with splash screen being displayed only for a few seconds.

I’m putting it out here to see if anyone else had similar issue. Please note that I only tested it on one machine. Judging from that single test however, I’m not impressed. I expected something more. If Apple wants to be a serious contender in the browser war, they will need to try better. Unless of course my experience is an isolated case.

[tags]safari, apple, windows, browser, bonjour, ms office, ms office slow startup, office slow[/tags]