Going on a Windows Safari
So what's Apple's Safari for Windows like?
The iJobs introduced a bunch of stuff at Apple's WWDC in San Francisco today, but the only one that you and I can check out straight off the bat is Safari for Windows. It seems to be OK on the hoary old iLamp here, so I downloaded the beta from Apple and installed it on Windows Vista 64.
The installation went without dramas; you don't need to get the full kaboodle with QT and iTunes and everything, as Apple has an 8MB Safari-only version of the beta available on the site.
First impression:
Ugh, Safari doesn't use Microsoft's Cleartype, but its own anti-aliasing/font-smoothing technology. The default Medium setting recommended for LCDs doesn't look great, and even at Light smoothing, Safari's anti-aliasing isn't as good as Cleartype.
Most of the sites I've tried work just as well as in Firefox, IE7 and Opera 9.x - in fact, I'm writing all this in Safari - but why oh why can't Apple make the Backspace key work with the Ctrl-key modifier? I use it all the time to delete entire words. And please Apple: in Windows, we can resize windows not just from the bottom righthand corner; this needs to be fixed.
The beta seems fast enough and stable for me. I see that Peter Griffin in the Herald however isn't impressed, as Safari crashes for him and isn't much faster than Firefox.
I haven't had any such issues yet, but twice as fast? I think that's Jobs' reality distortion field talking. That said, sites load fast enough, including the AJAX-heavy Netvibes feed reader. Flash sites like Youtube are also fine, and stylesheet support looks unproblematic. The Safari beta uses a lot of memory though... I'm up to 300MB already, with three windows and seven tabs in total open.
There's built-in support for RSS feeds, just as in IE and FF, a must-have feature for any browser.
Missing from Safari: zooming, like in IE7 and the printing support of Microsoft's browser. Plugins are available for Safari, but there's not the wealth and breadth of Firefox yet. There are probably some other things missing as well, but I can't think what they might be at the moment.
Overall, Safari for Windows seems a just fine, if unspectacular, browser. I can't think of a good reason why you'd want it, unless of course you work with Macs and Windows and want the same browser experience on both platforms. Am I missing something here?
Update Looks like certificates don't work properly in the beta... there's no Keychain on Windows, Apple.
Update II Safari looks like a very insecure proposition at this stage.
Comments
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Posted by: Haley28Shelly | July 23, 2010 3:31 AM
Dude.. what a lame review. This is by far the most ugly site ive seen in a while if it comes to jpeg compression ... and u talk about rendering on safari beeing bad?
Safari renders in my opinion texts way better then most standard browsers do. (like FF3, IE7, Chrome)
Quote
"I can't think of a good reason why you'd want it"
THE rendering is superb, why wouldnt u want to read things so clearly... ? And it's a fast browser.
You must really hate Apple for some reason. Altho I'm a Microsoft fanboy, I love Safari.
And btw... you can just resize from every direction. The difference is that apple has this nice styled edge to show the user that its resizeable from there... But you can use the other sides aswell. No problem.
Posted by: Angelo Michel | December 17, 2008 2:49 AM
Loaded safari twice, un installed twice.
once loaded there is absolutely NO text on the file edit view etc area, just empty grey space. Does not allow any web address input either.
Posted by: Del | June 14, 2007 6:45 PM
It sure isn't pretty but it does seem to load super quick on XP anyway.
Or maybe I've just slowed down my Firefox with too many extensions.
Posted by: Nick | June 13, 2007 1:10 PM
Juha: I have tried it. It is wonderful to have easily readable web pages on Windows at last.
Posted by: Bruce Hoult | June 13, 2007 12:50 PM
Bruce: you have to consider the fact that Cleartype is applied to every other program on Vista (unless turned off of course).
Then you have Safari doing its own thing. Try it, and see what your eyes tell you.
Thanks Dave, I was aware of the KHTML and have been using Konq for a long time :)
Posted by: Juha | June 13, 2007 10:15 AM
It might be worth pointing out that Safari is based on the open source KHTML rendering engine developed by volunteer KDE desktop developers for Linux... Apple adopted KHTML as a starting point for Safari because of its speed, rendering correctness (compliance with W3C Web Standards), and, well, the fact that it meant they didn't have to reinvent the wheel. If you want to see a good fast browser, give Konqueror on Linux (the browser built on KHTML) a try...
Now, if only Microsoft would learn a thing or two from Apple and ditch its abysmal "Trident" rendering engine for IE for something that's aware of web standards, then the world wouldn't have to suffer another brain dead, non-standards-compliant browser like IE6 or IE7...
Posted by: Dave Lane | June 13, 2007 9:43 AM
I can't believe that people think Cleartype is better!!
Yeah, if you look at a single character in isolation, cleartype is crisper, but it's crisper only because it moves entire letters so that they line up with pixel boundaries. It's one thing to do that on a 600 dpi laser printer (as Postscript has always done) where every stem and bar is a dozen or more pixels wide, but on a 100 dpi screen where lots of things are a single pixel wide? It's just horrid.
It's horrid because it totally spoils the relative spacing of letters in words, and because it totally throws off the relative weights of different parts of the characters. Both are incredibly jarring to the eye when reading.
The way OSX (and Safari on Windows) does it looks fuzzy close up, but if you're reading whole words and sentences and pages of text then it is an order of magnitude less tiring than Cleartype.
Just far far better for web pages and documents.
For things where every fiddly character matters, such as writing programs, I use non-fuzzy, hinted by hand, bitmapped Profont (a Monaco clone as God and Susan Kare intended) no matter what platform or program I'm using: emacs, Visual Studio, xterm, Windows, Linux, OSX...
Posted by: Bruce Hoult | June 12, 2007 11:00 PM
Got Safari today morning, 10 minutes later it was gone. Like you said, the fonts and pictures looked awful and I would swear that it is in fact slower than Firefox.
Steve Jobs needs to remember to take drugs AFTER the presentation, not before.
Posted by: Beeswax | June 12, 2007 8:47 PM