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6/11/2007

Apple’s Safari Browser for Windows

Filed under: General — geoff @ 2:37 pm

Apple has released it’s latest beta of Safari 3.0 for both Mac and Windows. It’s super fast, and pages look just like they do on my Mac. I tried out a fairly complex DHTML layout in both IE and Safari and you can really see the speed difference.

The font-smoothing is slightly rougher, though. Also, the interface and all pages appear slightly darker than on my Mac. I imagine this is do to the differing default gamma between Macs and PCs. I hope that Apple accounts for this in a future release and brightens things up a bit. There are adjustments for the font rendering in the preferences panel, and setting the anti-aliasing to “Light” does help a bit. There’s no way to turn it off completely.

The iTunes interface looks a tad cleaner in Windows XP than the new Safari.

I’m guessing that Safari for Windows uses the Firefox Flash plugin, but I’m not sure. I seriously doubt that it ships with Flash, although that would be a great way to increase penetration (Safari reports Flash 9,0,45,0 as does Firefox.) The Safari installer weighs in at just under 8mb, so I doubt there’s any Flash in there.

Despite the appearance issues, Safari loads fast, renders pages quickly, and works just as well as it does on a Mac. Try Safari for yourself.

Update: Hanford LeMoore has some issues with Safari on Windows as well.

Comments »

[...] I was pretty much taken off guard by Apple’s release of Safari for Windows. Still not quite sure what their real motives are… Webkit everywhere, I suppose. By boosting Safari’s market share, developers will start to write Javascript that’s a bit more compatible with the iPhone. But what has really surprised me is that some Windows users are actually complaining that it looks nice. It seems as though they like aliased text. I don’t get it. I can kind of understand the reluctant developer standpoint, but even still, anything that erodes the IE dominance is a good thing IMHO. Chastising a developer because they respect design and aesthetic doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. [...]

Pingback by Interesting… Windows Users Don’t Like Their Apps to Look Nice. | Visualrinse | Design and Development by Chad Udell — 6/11/2007 @ 4:56 pm

I tested it on Vista:

It loads fast, for sure.

But there are some bad poins also:
- fonts look blurry
- backspace does not work to go back to a previous page
- lots of pages have rendereing errors, probably because they are not tested on Safari, as it still has a very small penetration. Even google pages have severe errors! (http://www.google.com/ig?hl=be)
- I already crashed 2 times after some days of working

I hope these are fixed with the next release.
I stick with Internet Explorer & Firefox fot the time being: I like firefox over IE, but in real live I always use IE because that’s the only player that shows almost all sites as they where intended to look, just because Win/IE has the most user base.