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I can't tell if this launch is too late, but I welcome it: I develop on Linux and test on Windows with FF/IE/Opera/Safari. I don't need anymore to find a Mac to test my stuff.

BTW Firefox 3b4 is definitely a nice piece of software.

But what about the IE:Mac users?

I'm not joking, I've actually met one.

You can use Konqueror, there's significant overlap between KHTML and WebKit. And there are WebKit ports for Linux. On Debian you can install epiphany-webkit which is as you can guess Epiphany using the WebKit engine instead of Gecko. And then there's also Midori which also uses WebKit, but I haven't found ready made deb's.

I'm mildly amused by the prospect of running Safari on my Vista machine. I'll give it a shot.

Yup, It's a browser. Ran it on Vista and compared to an IE 8 Beta and Firefox 2. Loaded about the same. Didn't get a stop watch out or anything. I dislike how it looks. The biggest issue is the centred title with the right justified file menu. You're just left with the huge gray spaces that feel empty. Honestly, sticking with the typical window theme of having the title bar being just that, a different bar looks a lot better.

I could go on...

But yeah, not having to go grab a Mac to test html rendering is nice.

This is mostly due to a major difference in design philosophy between OS X and Windows. In OS X, the menu bar is not part of any application; it's always at the top of the screen, separate from the application. It takes some getting used to but overall it makes things consistent. Back to your point, since the menu bar is not part of the app window, there is none of that annoying grey space on the OS X version. The app's buttons and url widgets are flush with the title bar above and bookmarks bar below (or tab bar if you've turned off the bookmarks bar). Obviously this isn't possible on Windows so they had to do the best they could. Personally I think it could look better too but when you're so limited I guess there's not much room for choice.

Back when Vista was still called Longhorn and there was so much speculation in the air about how much it was going to "borrow" from Mac OS this time around, I was so hoping Microsoft would do the global menu bar thing. I guess that would have been too similar, though.

Microsoft is unable to make any radical changes to their interface due to established history. If Microsoft were to create such a new interface it would essentially reset their operating system market share.

When MacOS transitioned to MacOS X, there was not much of a real shift in interface. Sure, the dock was added, but everything else was essentially the same. The plumbing was certainly different, and at this point it is the only thing that can change a lot.

dont really stop then tho. just look at ie7, and its missing menubar. instead its contained under the cogs button.

that is unless you hit alt, and then it appears.

hmm, now that i think about it, isnt that how most of the windows apps in vista are supposed to be?

also, there is the "ribbons" system in the latest ms office...

While it is true that they have modified Internet Explorer and Office, it is using small modifications through the generations.

same as whats apple doing then, imo...

A whole other bowl of worms so to speak. I dislike the Mac method but that's a whole separate topic. The 'global menu' from my viewpoint is far less efficient method of working but as always YMMV and a lot of people work differently.

It's a different design philosophy but when dropping their app on a platform that uses the other mode of operation, they could try and 'think different.' Thank you for pointing out why it looks bad, I didn't think of the menu bar difference.

I 'discovered' a new annoyance which prompted me to remove Safari. Bonjour was installed which for some strange reason prevented my system from connecting to the internet. It connected to the local network just fine but it decided that the Internet was a separate network connection but that connection would not talk to the local network which prevented net access.

Probably just a configuration thing with Bonjour but thank you Apple for installing a separate app I didn't ask for and screwing things up. The problem did not exist when I initially installed and didn't occur until I booted the machine up this morning. Un-installing Safari and Bonjour was an easy fix.

Apple is such an arrogant company. They have strict guidelines on how apps should look and function on their OS but they don't follow them consistently in their own apps for their OS. Then when they build an app for Windows it always looks so out of place. That don't seem to have any respect for others.

Someone should magically create a Shapeshifer or Safaricon for windows.

Yes, FF 3 is nice but how is it better than Safari 3.1? I'm not questioning you, just wondering how is it better (to inform myself).

For one, it's free software.

Note that I don't like either of them very much, as KDE user I'm used to even more comfort and speed

Being free doesn't make it better software. It might make it a better choice for some people for that reason, but that's an entirely different issue.

that's true, yes...

I tried Safari for Windows, and I'm really disappointed to see that the look and feel doesn't integrate with Windows AT ALL. Why don't they just use normal bindings and a normal graphical library like other cross-platform or native applications? IMO, using the Mac look and feel inside Windows is a serious lack of taste. Not to mention the ugly/fuzzy fonts while the rest of Windows fonts are clean. And, well, it's a standalone browser like Firefox or Internet Explorer, so it's too limited.

Because Apple is "special" they don't need to integrate with windows, but it also makes sense for them to associate the visual style with iTunes and QT.

The fuzzy fonts are a feature, another difference in the design philosophy. They are fuzzier but apparently more accurate whereas cleartype sacrifices accuracy for clarity. Personally I prefer cleartype.

Either way its not for me. Before FF3 beta's came out it would have been interesting to test a fast browser but I suspect that ff3 has narrowed the gap in rendering speed and has beaten the memory issues that I had with ff2.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 looks like all other windows application? NO. Microsoft Windows Mediaplayer looks like other windows applications? NO again.

So bragging about Safari alien look is pot and kettle battle....

IMHO btw.

Ok, but I'm not happy with Microsoft diverting from the common Windows look and feel in the cases of Windows Media Player and Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 too! They should have kept the same look as other applications for these two products.

Actually I don't like ClearType either (although I prefer it to the Mac rendering). On my LCD monitor, I feel more comfortable with the default Windows XP font rendering. It's clear, easy to read as always.

The Fuzzy fonts is a matter of which kind of font rendering approach (Apple's or Microsoft's) your eyes are used to. Its a bit similar to how some people found Cleartype fuzzy the first time they saw it. It happened with some friends and family when XP was just released. Or when you enable it with a CRT monitor.

I got a MacBook Pro in October, and ever since then I use Windows at work and MacOS at home. Roughly its a 70/30 ratio. Apple's style of font rendering took me about a couple weeks to get used to, but nowadays I prefer it a lot better over Cleartype.

My main problem with Cleartype is that once you get out of as selected list of font face/size combinations, rendering is very weak. A lot of fonts become unreadable at 10 or 11 points (Myriad, Palatino), while others scale very bad or glyphs get deformed (Bitstream Vera, Consolas). Consolas for me is the worst offender, since it is my main programming font. Start at Consolas 8, then go to Consolas 9. There is almost no change on the font size at all. Now go to Consolas 10 and 11. Huge changes. Its very hard to find a good middle ground. In OSX I can comfortably change the font size without sacrificing readability whenever I need to fit a bit more of extra text or code in the screen. I don't have that Luxury on Windows - most of the time either I get the right size or the readability, but not both, unless I use a set of heavily optimized fonts.

Edited 2008-03-21 05:31 UTC

Fuzzy fonts in Safari was a *problem* that has been solved. What you have now, is a matter of tasty, like you said, of different rendering approaches.

If anyone found Safari's fonts "fuzzy" in first betas, you may want to try again and see if you still find the same "fuzziness". (and you may also, try different rendering settings in the preferences' window)

Some feature!

Safari fonts look absolutely awful on my PC.

With the default font settings, the L's are completely orange, and many other letters have a distracting orange hue. Ever tried pushing your fingers against an LCD screen (not an expensive one!) to see the colors shift and change? Same effect.

Vista/IE/Firefox look fine because ClearType is properly configured on my PC.

I tried the other three font smoothing options in Safari, but they look even worse. Safari needs some advanced options to fix whatever font smoothing settings Apple has misconfigured by default on my PC:

HP w2207 LCD
8800 GTS 512
Vista Home Premium x64

...or at least provide an option to switch to ClearType.

On a side note, many older public releases of Quicktime on the Windows platform used to have this problem, along with horrendous clipping/redrawing problems that made Quicktime's UI worse than some of the worst beta software I've used. (I mean, sometimes only a few controls out of the whole Quicktime window would actually be shown when the app was first opened.)

Does Apple have some sort of longstanding problem with writing/testing Windows software?

Oddly, iTunes has always looked fine to me. o.0

I'm sorry, but what windows app DOES look native? Any of the MS applications like Office, MSN, Mediaplayer? Firefox? Even Notepad doesn't feel like it belongs. It's just a mess, how can Apple make it worse... If you compare a typical win desktop with an average Linux or Mac, it's laughable.

>However, when Firefox 3 launches, the party will probably be over.

I doubt it: sure it'll use less memory and have faster Javascript than FF2, but AFAIK it has still (big) flaws:
- it's fragile: I've remember that a crash in a flash plugin which crashed the browser.
- it's non responsive: sometimes when one tab freeze, the whole browser freeze, which is an indication of poor threading.

Most of that 'old' sensation comes from the rather spartan UI - No matter how far out in front of the rest of the pack Webkit is so far as rendering HTML (which is questionable) there's no getting around that Safari itself feels like a trip in the Wayback machine to IE 3. The reduced controls and options always leaves me feeling like it is a mobile browser (which it's memory footprint quickly dismisses) given the lack of options that have been pretty much standard since IE5 Windows. (mind you, IE5 mac also feels like that same trip with Mr. Peabody)

One thing to watch for on those speed reports is that for the most part ALL of those benchmarks are loaded - you can tell that since all of thier charts list opera as the slowest - which given EVERYONE else's numbers on that subject list opera faster than FF in less memory, brings their entire page into question...

That and Safari is built to use SSE3 instructions on x86 hardware - if you have an older processor that doesn't support SSE3, you're emulating it (just as there are emulation layers available for many of the cracked 'hackintosh' versions of OSX) meaning that on a pre SSE3 processor like an Athlon XP, A64 3000+, or pre-prescott P4 - it's going to run like molassas in february. When the beta was first released you heard wildly varying reports of it's speed - a LOT of reviewers flat out calling Apple's numbers bullshit - the reason was simple, they were testing on non SSE3 hardware.

Though with webkit being OSS, maybe we'll someday have a Firefox equivalent built around it - relegating Safari to the same slow death as Mozilla Suite.

I've tried a beta of firefox 3 in OS X and it was slow as shit so they don't have any competition to worry about here, from Mozilla that is. Opera owns safaris ass.

I don't care for the looks of it, even on Mac OS X and the Apple fanatics hate the look of Firefox because it has colour, the lack of native widgets not being a problem on Firefox 3.

The one thing I've noticed with Safari on WinXP is that, if I have the "classic" interface with a theme, Safari looks very out of place, but then a lot of software just doesn't conform. Click on the menus and you're thrust back into another look.

In any case, alternatives are great.

If you've already got Firefox installed, you're not the target market (unless you're a web developer).

It's all those people who've got iTunes (because they have iPods), but haven't ventured outside of the world of Internet Explorer yet (and personally, as a web developer, the quicker they gravitate towards something, anything that's actually standards-compliant--be it FF, Safari or Opera--the better).

Apple makes money off every entry into the built-in Google search bar.

http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog/2007/06/safari_for_windows_cachi...

The $100 million figure is only an estimated guess, but Apple does make money off Safari. It's a no-brainer, really - Mozilla includes a Google search bar in Firefox too.

Now i wonder: Why doesnt Konqueror get that cash for including google search? .. that would have been a great anouncement from Google at the KDE4 release event if you ask me.

At a guess because Apple and the Mozilla Corporation were doing buisness while the KDE folk were developing software?

What, you don't know this fundamental basic tenet of humankind?

What, you don't know this fundamental basic tenet of humankind?

Those who do all the work are compensated by just a tiny fraction of what those get that then take that work, wrap it up nicely, smile at you, and take your cheque.

"

Makes sense, when it's true. If you think KDE has done the bullk of the work on WebKit you're smoking something.

WebKit Trunk alone is over 1GB. That's most certainly not KHTML/KJS.

Trunk now has the following ports:
Cocoa, GTK+, Qt, Win and wX.

GNUstep has a project to port WebKit to GNUstep on Linux as well and of course that will be Objective-C.

You're right, I was exaggerating.

To get google search profits? But Safari leaks memory like there is no tomorrow so who cares.

You mean like alot of Windows software where you get stuff you didn't ask for selected as default?

Why can't Apple use their software installer to give people their new software applications to Windows users, that never ever happens on Windows does it just like all the apps fighting to become default or start up. BTW, iTunes plays videos now so it needs QT.

Edited 2008-03-21 00:12 UTC

You mean like alot of Windows software where you get stuff you didn't ask for selected as default?

How is having a default selection of components for a program you are installing even remotely related to having a program's updater telling you about software you don't even have? It's clear that Apple is just using their updater to try and push their other programs onto the user.

Why can't Apple use their software installer to give people their new software applications to Windows users, that never ever happens on Windows does it just like all the apps fighting to become default or start up.

Uh, because maybe people don't want them? The fact that they don't have them installed to begin with might be a tipoff. There's a big difference between programs you already have installed wanting to be default (which itself is poor design but is no longer common) and an updater for a particular program trying to get you to install completely different programs from that company. In any case you may have heard the expression two wrongs don't make a right. Saying "Yeah but Windows" doesn't excuse Apple's poor software designs.

BTW, iTunes plays videos now so it needs QT.

Read his post again, he doesn't have iTunes. He only has QuickTime and it most certainly does not need iTunes.

Edited 2008-03-21 07:19 UTC

You are are course correct about the software being made like that.

You can ignore the Safari software and then it won't come up again(there's a option in the updater) and also you can download the Quicktime update separately. The updater is optional as well and as for quicktime putting itself in he taskbar, as far as I know it's always done that right back from the win98 days.

Edited 2008-03-21 14:23 UTC

So your defense of Apple is "well, Windows software does it!"? Could you possibly choose an example with at least a little integrity? Is this really the environment you want to compare with Apple?

So your defense of Apple is "well, Windows software does it!"? Could you possibly choose an example with at least a little integrity? Is this really the environment you want to compare with Apple?

And when this sort of thing happens in WIndows (when a program tries to get you to install other programs than the one you initially downloaded), it's usually called malware.

In the keynote where he announced Safari for Windows, Steve Jobs very openly stated that they primarily hope to garner market share by bundling it with iTunes and Quicktime. He didn't seem very ashamed of it. I guess it's become common practice. And honestly, as far as moral lapses go, writing and offering more free software is probably not the worst Apple could have done.

This sort of thing gets Microsoft sued.

Oh well... just the price of success, I guess.

It doesn't...It should

Two words : Quicktime Alternative

Oh come on, its not that bad; Want to know bad - download Real Player (after registering *JUST* to download it - because there is no simply way through their web interface) or one of the many AOL products which sprawl stuff from one end of the hard disk to another.

I have to admit that what has pissed me off the most is this forced pushing of iTunes + Quicktime; you don't get the same sort of thing with Mac, you can choose one or the other through their updater.

Anyway, quite frankly, if you do have an iPod, you're better off going with a Mac. The number of issues I've had with iTunes, iPod and Windows is too many to remember. Whether its Windows, iTunes or the iPod, I don't care. All I care is for my stuff to work properly - and that seems only possible on Mac when with an iPod.

As for Safari, running it right now. It STILL isn't compatible with blogger rich text form; this is what happens when one tries to past to it:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v420/kaiwai/bullchunder.png

Apart from that, its alot more stable, which is a good thing(tm)

AFAIK, Maxthon is just a wrapper around the Trident rendering engine used by IE...

All the other browsers you mentioned use different rendering engines.

In other words, Maxthon will only run on Windows, and doesn't come with a rendering engine of its own.

Oh, and check your facts - Safari doesn't use either trident or gecko.

Edited 2008-03-21 05:35 UTC

Mainly because it's just a nicer GUI slapped on top of IE. Nothing wrong with that, but I suspect most of the people reading osnews probably aren't big fans of the Trident engine and IE7 solved many of the really bad things about IE browser shell like not having tabs.

Hint:
IE = Trident,
Maxthon = Trident,
Firefox = Gecko,
Safari = Webkit,
Konqueror = KHTML (close cousin of Webkit), and
Opera = Opera? or whatever they call it

Edited 2008-03-21 05:42 UTC

Well that explains why nobody mentions it and yes, i should get my facts straight!

I was merely trying to make the point that, from my experience, maxthon is the faster psuedo browser out there: apple claims that safari is the fastest but from my experience, it isn't.

I'm just tired of reading Apple's rhetocical BS (their ads etc)

Opera's rendering engine is called Presto.

I've used Maxthon for 2-3 years. It's great and keeps getting better. Never mind what it runs on--unless you only use Apple OS. It has the advantages of IE in that it will display properly any page designed for IE, but at the same time it has more security features built into it.

If you work very hard at configuring Firefox, you can come within several yards of a browser with all Maxthon's features, but it still probably wouldn't be as fast.

Why does no one ever mention Maxthon. My guess is that because it's developed by a small (30-man) company in Beijing and spends not a penny on advertising. But it's not 30 percent of the Chinese market and it's growing slowly in the U.S. as people try it.

Moorloch

"offering Safari 3.1 for download" is not the same as "installs [...] without asking"

It has been the nature of the world for a long time. I see most Vista machines fitted with some trial office and works.

Huh? Click on Edit | Preferences. Click on the General tab. The "Save downloaded file to:" allows you to select Desktop or other... Pick a location on your file-system.