13 Responses to “Safari on Windows?”

1. Henry Bramlet Says:
   June 12th, 2007 at 8:53 am

   I wish I had a dollar for every time a web developer has told me/written “There is a bug in how Safari handles” followed by any web element (divs, drop-downs, forms, javascript, peanut butter, etc)….

2. cp Says:
   June 12th, 2007 at 9:01 am

   I’d rather have the IE dollars, but yeah. Mercifully the JavaScript libraries are getting better and better, and they do a pretty good job of hiding the problems that the different browsers have.

   There’s part of me that wants to be excited about KHTML getting bigger, as it will only put pressure on Gecko and IE to improve. Another part of me wishes that they had just put their efforts behind Firefox and called it a day. (They can’t get the Googlemoney from the Windows Safari users if they do that.) Oh well.

3. Henry Bramlet Says:
   June 12th, 2007 at 9:03 am

   In related news- Firefox 2.0 has inline spell-checking. Comment boxes across the Internet are now safe from my half-thought, quick posts of poorly spelled verve.

4. Henry Bramlet Says:
   June 12th, 2007 at 9:04 am

   Which is to say, Firefox 2.0 makes me spell good!

5. cp Says:
   June 12th, 2007 at 9:11 am

   Sorry, WebKit. Not KHTML. What decade is it again?

   A wired article has what I take to be a pretty good explanation:

   Apple is also throwing a bone to iPhone developers. If developers create software for the highly anticipated gadget using Jobs’ “sweet” Safari development plan, they get to run those apps in Safari on Windows for free. Maybe this is part of Apple’s plan to create a plug-in platform for Safari — by offering it up as a big platform for developers. And maybe in a year or so Safari will be a better browser because of it.

   But from what I’ve heard, nobody is particularly thrilled about Apple’s iPhone SDK strategy. (Write web applications!) I think it’s a neat idea, but I don’t think it’s how I’d want to write a dedicated phone application if I were to write a dedicated phone application.

6. cp Says:
   June 12th, 2007 at 9:11 am

   Firefox also has FireBug. Which, for my purposes, makes it the only browser worth looking at.

7. Henry Bramlet Says:
   June 12th, 2007 at 4:18 pm

   Yes, FireBug is the biggest awesomeness that ever did awesome.

8. Christopher Smith Says:
   June 12th, 2007 at 6:47 pm

   So, Joel Spolsky pointed out it is useful for comparing Apple and Microsoft font rendering technology. It has also been good for security researchers apparently. ;-) Might be fun for the WINE guys to play with.

   Other than that… yeah, what is the point?

9. Henry Bramlet Says:
   June 13th, 2007 at 10:39 am

   I have to say…I like the Windows fonts better. As he says in the article, I am more familiar with the Windows fonts, yes, but I also find the crisp-fonts easier to read.

   Using the old FireFox text rendering, the fonts were similarly blurry before (I don’t know how close to the Safari rendering they were). At one point, I was shown some pages using IE7 and I was blown away with how much easier it was to read a long article. Unfortunately, IE7 was so slow to render and buggy, that I stopped using it despite the comfort. Now that FireFox2 is out, I have the best of both worlds- updated text rendering and a good platform.

10. cp Says:
    June 13th, 2007 at 11:43 am

    I am ashamed to say that I have never noticed a huge difference between font rendering on Windows, OS X and Linux. Of course, I use the same browser on all three, (Well, all two nowadays. I don’t use Windows at work any more) which might explain things.

    I use great damn big fixed-width fonts for most of the text editing that I do, and I haven’t really noticed a huge (any?) difference there, either. (Then again, I’m viewing text in Emacs in all three [now two] platforms, so perhaps this is the same thing.)

    Clearly Joel and Jeff Atwood and etc just have to use fewer different pieces of software. Then they wouldn’t notice things like font rendering.

11. Henry Says:
    June 14th, 2007 at 6:07 pm

    It’s not the different applications that bother me, it’s the myriad sites I visit. If only all websites gave up kerning and variable-width fonts…

    PS: Awesome FireFox2.0 feature #100000 - Reloads all pages that were open if it was closed by the system previously (i.e. a forced restart of firefox or one of windows’ hourly security updates that require reboot).

12. Brad T. Says:
    June 26th, 2007 at 11:23 am

    I ran it on Windows, because I needed a third browser, one incapable of running Google Gears. How does it handle that? Well, it likes to tell me there are errors in my javascript, and it looks pretty.

    “It’s everything Steve Jobs ever wanted in a girlfriend.”

13. cp Says:
    June 26th, 2007 at 11:34 am

    Is there no gears plugin for Safari? That’s weak. (Or is it just Safari on Windows that there’s no gears for?)

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