Apple Introduces Safari Browser for Microsoft Windows

[Brett_Tabke]

[news.yahoo.com...]

Apple Inc. launched a version of its Safari Web browser for Windows-based PCs on Monday, pitting it against Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox.

"What we've got here is the most innovative browser in the world and the most powerful browser in the world," said Apple CEO Steve Jobs said during his keynote speech at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference.

Safari, which was released a few years ago for Apple's Macintosh computers, has captured about 5 percent of the world's market share for Internet browsers with more than 18 million users, Jobs said.

[zCat]

This is potentially an awesome step forward for cross-platform testing. Can anyone with a Mac as well as a PC confirm that Safari renders pretty much identically on both platforms?

On the pages it does render, it looks pretty Mac-ish. (Only it also feels kind of dirty, running it under Windows ;-).

I develop mainly on Linux, and experience shows that pages render in Konqueror pretty much in the same way that they do in Safari (widgets are all different of course), so I'd expect Windows Safari to be very close to the Mac Safari.

[travelin cat]

We're on Macs and use Firefox. I felt sort of like I betrayed my loyalty to Apple when we switched to FF but the extensions offered are too important to us as developers.

BTW Safari is MUCH faster the any other browser on our G5 iMacs.

Now if Apple would allow extensions like FF, I would dump Mozilla in a nanosecond...

[whoisgregg]

I'll venture a guess that the dramatically screwed up sites are ones which are doing their own browser sniffing and weren't prepared for this new user agent combination. (It used to be pretty safe to assume that the presence of "windows" meant "not safari.")

Added: Official Apple Safari page [apple.com]

[edited by: tedster at 11:23 pm (utc) on June 11, 2007]

[JAB Creations]

ronin

Can anyone with a Mac as well as a PC confirm that Safari renders pretty much identically on both platforms?

[developer.apple.com...]

Short answer: yes. It contains the same obnoxious bugs I could only test at while I was in college. The bugs that annoy me the most...

The noscript element is displayed while JavaScript is enabled if it is not associated with a script. I think Opera 6 has this bug.

Safari doesn't like JavaScript based cookies. If they do work I never got them to work at all.

- John

*Edit* Hopefully this will pressure Microsoft to add CSS3 multiple background image support in IE8. If there was only one thing we were "allowed" it would have to be that!

[edited by: JAB_Creations at 11:53 pm (utc) on June 11, 2007]

[Swanson]

Its a good move - but a bit sad that probably the only people that are using it have posted in this thread!

Lets hope it gets more usage that mac users - as even that is dwindling as most designers I know only use a mac as a "checker" rather than the primary design computer.

And as they should - mac is significantly inferior for commercial applications as they don't interop with most code systems (Linux PHP, Windows .NET).

Still it looks good - but a few sites break now and then.

[edited by: Swanson at 12:06 am (utc) on June 12, 2007]

[g1smd]

Vista having completely killed my Mozilla Seamonkey installation a week or two back pushed me over to using Opera 9.2 instead.

I'll give Safari a shot and see how that goes...

[whoisgregg]

mac is significantly inferior for commercial applications as they don't interop with most code systems (Linux PHP, Windows .NET).

Wow, haven't seen a trolling comment like that in quite some time. And I was so used to the current renaissance of operating system pluralism. :/

[dcheney]

Thanks SuzyUK - I hit the same problem and that solution worked perfectly.

Now for the real testing... :-)

[TypicalSurfer]

I like the feel of it but it won't replace FF.

cons:
no ability to add search providers, installs with Y! and GOOG.
No plugins (FF style).

pros:

fast

[vincevincevince]

Downloaded... starting trying to get it to work with wine.

[koan]

It's too bad that MS stopped supporting IE for the Mac

I wasn't too unhappy, it was pretty hellish in terms of compatibility. Safari was a step up, definitely.

[wealjays]

I call B.S. (or a crappy BETA) on the speed claims.

Mine seems pretty slow actually.

I imported a bookmark folder from FF and opened in all tabs took a lot longer to load than FF. Also, tried loading a yahoo finance page and it took longer than FF.

Some off-the-bat reasons why I probably won't be able to switch (regardless of a supposed speed bump)

* No favicons in the bookmarks toolbar (I had such a cool favicon only toolbar, now I would have to describe each bookmark and read the tags)
* No Ctrl-Enter for www.----.com insertion
* Interferes with my hiding taskbar (doesn't pop up when I mouse over bottom edge of screen when using Safari)
* Hovering over browser buttons doesn't provide any info (annoying but I will figure out the cryptic icons)
* No quick "X" for closing several tabs (although FF removed this with 2.0, I installed it as an extension)
* Keeps resizing the window on me (upon returning after switching apps) [side note: a feature in general that I am shocked is not availabe on a Mac (I am even more shocked that no one talks about it) is that you can't toggle a window to full size easily like in Windows

I have to say that although I usually find Apple products to be really well thought out and in most cases light years ahead of Microsoft in innovation, they seem to always miss a couple of crucial things that scare me away. Safari for Windows has plenty of annoyances and therefore [unless updated] is not for me.

[oodlum]

I imported a bookmark folder from FF and opened in all tabs took a lot longer to load than FF. Also, tried loading a yahoo finance page and it took longer than FF.

Be sure to clear your FF cache for an accurate benchmark.

[oodlum]

Blogger has never worked properly in Safari - most of the tools are missing when making a post. This is also true of an open source blog I have installed on one of my sites.

Can someone confirm if this is the same in the Windows version?

[annej]

divs not working as expected and char width/ max chars in form fields that are going nuts

Yikes! I don't wanna know. It's bad enough trying to get my CSS working right on both IE and Firefox.

[alias]

Yup, confirming here too, the Bookmarks also crash my Safari (running on WinXP). That's rather disappointing.

[Scally_Ally]

It doesnt like multi monitor..
try moving it over to your second monitor then trying to maximise..
It disappears, and you cant get it back.

[badgering]

haha, thats funny, it disappears alright! I couldn’t use this as my primary browser simply because of features like the back button not working, and you cant ctrl + enter in the address bar to automaticly put the www and .com in, you also cant ctrl + tab thought the tabs. Ive only just installed this an i found these things annoying already.

Looks great for testing though.

[GrendelKhan TSU]

ugh.. was excited for a bit...but didn't work for like first 5 korean sites I viewed (totally missing images, menus and content)..literally only like 20% of page content would load. this was on the major portals here.

don't know if that's just my computer but that's not good...even for a beta.

ex (random page on major Korean portal):
[mgame.daum.net...]

[brd1984]

does anyone else have the same problem as me -

cannot change any proxy settings - its greyed out...?

[The Contractor]

This Browser has a bug

Well, every person I know (who owns a Mac) considered FF a Godsend since Apple doesn't seem to want to continue developing or working out the bugs Safari has....ironic they are doing this with Win..

[bill]

Wow. I had it running for an entire 47 seconds! Went to my Chinese site and it crashed. Maybe I'll wait until tomorrow to try again. ;)

Did anyone install that Apple Update software? What's that? I opted out of everything.

[adfree]

From the looks of it Apple risk to ridicule themselves with releases like that. Who the heck tested that?

You can't explain all heavy bugs and crashes with BETA status. It does not perform very basic functions without crashing. This is really disappointing!

[rocknbil]

Shh. We don't say "crash" in reference to Safari. We say "unexpectedly quit."

[adfree]

WIRED isn't happy either... [wired.com]

There's only one problem with that scenario -- Safari sucks...

[SilverLining]

It's so strange seeing a .wmv on Safari...

Pretty much similar rendering to Safari on the Mac - both don't seem to support 100% height in CSS one hundred percent.

Good start for testing from Windows though. Now all we need is IE back on the Mac (without having to purchase virtual PC or reboot into Boot camp).

[rogerd]

>>starting trying to get it to work with wine.

Perhaps you need something stronger. ;)

[Jimmy Turnip]

Well that's pretty cool.

Anyone else having a bit of trouble with interactive flash?

I've got a site with a draggable flash component. Doesn't seem to be going anywhere :(

[SuzyUK]

Hey all.. seems the fix above (for the no text) is not enough for some, specially designers who may have more than 800 fonts installed on their Windows system (seems that includes me!)

this bug reply explains the problem [bugs.webkit.org]

I found it happening to me especially when I came here and saw no threads! ;) Verdana was truncated from my fonts.plist file so some sites were only partially rendering, chrome was OK.

fonts.plist can usually be found:
C:\Documents and Settings\~username~\Local Settings\Application Data\Apple Computer\Safari

the fix was to open up the fonts.plist file in notepad and edit the keys to add the more common fonts that were missing. copy the format that's there and use the file names from your system (C:\WINDOWS\Fonts)

e.g. here's what I added to the file which worked for me:

<key>Lucida Grande</key>
<string>C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\Lucida Grande.ttf</string>
<key>Lucida Grande Bold</key>
<string>C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\Lucida Grande Bold.ttf</string>
<key>Tahoma</key>
<string>C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\TAHOMA.TTF</string>
<key>Tahoma Bold</key>
<string>C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\tahomabd.ttf</string>
<key>Times New Roman</key>
<string>C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\TIMES.TTF</string>
<key>Times New Roman Bold</key>
<string>C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\TIMESBD.TTF</string>
<key>Times New Roman Italic</key>
<string>C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\TIMESI.TTF</string>
<key>Times New Roman Bold Italic</key>
<string>C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\TIMESBI.TTF</string>
<key>Trebuchet MS</key>
<string>C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\trebuc.TTF</string>
<key>Trebuchet MS Bold</key>
<string>C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\trebucbd.TTF</string>
<key>Trebuchet MS Bold Italic</key>
<string>C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\trebucbi.TTF</string>
<key>Trebuchet MS Italic</key>
<string>C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\trebucit.TTF</string>
<key>Verdana</key>
<string>C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\verdana.TTF</string>
<key>Verdana Bold</key>
<string>C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\verdanab.TTF</string>
<key>Verdana Italic</key>
<string>C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\verdanai.TTF</string>
<key>Verdana Bold Italic</key>
<string>C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\verdanaz.TTF</string>

You could edit/remove unnecessary TTF files from the WINDOWS>Fonts directory and then remove the fonts.plist file and allow the system to rebuild you a new fonts.plist file, but I found I only had to add a couple of the more common fonts that were missing from the end of the file.. e.g. Verdana, Times New Roman, I also didn't want to muck with my system files, just want to see the pages for testing you know ;)
Note: sometimes this file needs to be set to read only to save Safari trying to rebuild it everytime it restarts, but again I didn't need that so it must be a different type of install

anyway, I can't see me using Safari except like IE - to test with only!

Suzy

[edited by: SuzyUK at 12:43 pm (utc) on June 12, 2007]

[Solution1]

It doesn't display bold text on my system (others have the same problem). The Webmasterworld front page looks strangely empty, without all the thread titles.

I find these animated dialog boxes annoying. It's a relief to see the Microsoft one, when Safari crashes.