Safari For Windows

[Amailer]

Quote:

Apple has launched a version of its web browser Safari for Windows, competing head to head with Microsoft's Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6742439.stm

Download it at:
http://www.apple.com/safari/

It doesn't work on my computer very well at all, lags a lot and the menus just don't display (I can't even see the address in the url bar oO).

Anyhow, this is pretty good, for web developers especially

[Tony]

This is absolutely amazing. Even if Safari doesn't gain any ground on the Windows platform (although every web dev person should get a copy), all the press this is getting has got to bring some attention to "alternative" browsers. My local newspaper (along with BBC above it appears) considers Firefox as a "mainstream" browser

Actually Apple probably wouldn't much care for casual users, Safari is mostly for developers so that they can start developing compliant applications for iPhone. There's no SDK, just AJAX. Hmm...

[rdrake]

It actually works fairly well here. The interface still needs work, but it's not too bad for a beta.

[Amailer]

Any ideas why it won't work on my computer though? Highly bugged for me.

I like the fact thats its 'simple', on my mac it looks good and works good too

[Clayton]

I don't know, but on my computer it keeps using up ~75% CPU Time, so... yeah, I dropped that like a bad habit.

[Dan]

I tryed to run it threw wine on my gentoo install. The installer worked fine but i can not get the browser to start up. I wish they whould make a linux version so i whould not have to switch to windows to use it.

[Martin]

Careful, apparently there are a slew of vulnerabilities for it already.

[rizzix]

I'm posting this through safari (on Vista).

Its decent.
Long load time.
Fast rendering speeds. (compsci.ca loads faster after safari cache's quite a bit of it.)
It does not use ClearType, but Apple's own antialiasing engine. (fonts finally look cool).
It uses a LOT of memory. Vista uses ~50%, safari uses ~20%.

No Firefox's extensions.

[Martin]

I think that if someone really wants to start holding Firefox back they really have to start to compete with the extensions. I don't care how fast a browser is; if it doesn't have adblock or mouse gestures, you can't sell it to me.

[josh]

I like the browse but I have a few annoyances with it:

When I ctrl-click on links in a g-mail message (i.e. facebook e-mails) it still does not open the link in a new tab, it opens it in a new window (I also changed the setting in preferences telling it to open links in new tabs).

Also, when I have minimized it to the taskbar, if I click on it to restore the window it resizes the window to a non-maximized size even though I previously had it maximized.

Overall I really liked it, however it is just annoying not to have the links from g-mail messages open in the same window.

[Amailer]

And no one has encountered issues with the menus not being displayed? (Basically any text like, how in firefox you see File, Edit, View and etc doesn't get displayed, but if you go over it, you'll see a menu fall, but again, with no text).

And...with no url being displayed in the url bar?

Its all text-issues

[Tony]

Amailer @ Wed Jun 13, 2007 11:02 am wrote:

Basically any text like, how in firefox you see File, Edit, View and etc doesn't get displayed

Apple has gone to great lengths to bring the OSX experience in the Safari browser.

There's a lot of buzz on the internets about Safari using Apple's own font render algorithms instead of Window's native ClearType. The maximize "annoyance" is likely left over from how OSX handles "maximizing" apps. Apple apps also don't come with File/Edit/Whatever bars, all such menus are taken out of the app's window and snapped to the top of the desktop.

I would tend to believe that annoyances originate from the differences between "the Windows way" and "the Apple way" of doing things. Trust me, there are no less issues with using a Mac version of IE.

[rizzix]

They usually fix these annoyances. Remeber iTunes (for windows) when it first came out? Look at it now. Its 100x better than what it was before.

[Tony]

Well that is why Safari is in Beta

Besides, iTunes is there for iPods and the iTunes store -- it would make sense to tweak it towards a more accustomed "Windows experience". If we consider Safari to be the testing grounds for iPhone developers, then tuning it to user experiences would just introduce more annoyances when the apps misbehave in the real environment (iPhone's Safari that is).

[rizzix]

Safari uses WebKit to handle the javascript/html rendering. As long as Safari for windows does not modify or tweak the webkit specifically for windows, it's all good and I doubt they would do that anyway.

Other than that any modifications they do to Safari to tweak it to the windows experience wil not really bring about any annoyances in term of apps misbehaving when deployed on the iPhone.