OSNews:

Windows...

donotreply@osnews.com (Ruahine) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 17:35:00 GMT

I wonder how much of an inroad Safari is making on the Windows platform.
I've got a mac, but never use Safari myself, so I wonder whether many people use Safari on windows at all.

RE: Windows...

donotreply@osnews.com (thjayo) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 17:40:00 GMT

I tried it.
But the whole can't-use-accented-characters is a huge huge blow off, because in portuguese, there are all kinds of Ã¡ Ã Ã© Ã£ and so on.

RE: Windows...

donotreply@osnews.com (optimusg4) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

I think the main goal for Safari on Windows is for iPhone development, even though Steve last year proclaimed it to be the fasted browser on Windows.

I rarely use Safari on my Mac; mainly Camino or Fireox for my needs. Of course, for website design/development, I do fire it up to make sure it displays fine.

For switchers, it makes sense that they would use the included browser and nothing else as that's what they did on Windows. Not saying all switchers of course, but the general consumers who just browse the internet and check email.

RE[2]: Windows...

donotreply@osnews.com (kain) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 18:28:00 GMT

Actually, Safari CAN show accented characters, what it does not do (either by choice or technical limitation) is not render windows specific characters. For instance, the character 'Ã©' if attained via charmap (or a different language typeset keyboard) will use the windows character encoding directly. Most web browsers will be lenient when rendering these characters and show the correct ones anyway, but Safari does not (and neither does Firefox if you put it into Strict xhtml mode, etc).

Sure fire way to get those chars appearing is by using the html encoded character in it's place:

< !ENTITY eacute CDATA "é" -- latin small letter e with acute, U+00E9 ISOlat1 -->

If you view the source of my post, you'll see that while I can render the char 'Ã©', I have to use the html encoding to make it render in Safari.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/sgml/entities.html

EDIT: ARG

OSNews is garbaging all my hard work, even though their preview renders it correctly, the site escapes my html encoded stuff... just check out that link.Edited 2008-02-07 18:30 UTC

RE: Windows...

donotreply@osnews.com (TaterSalad) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 19:05:00 GMT

I have safari loaded on my Windows PC but very rarely use it. It was loaded to try it out, now I only use it if I want to use something other than firefox for web browsing. I like to switch things around a bit, gets boring looking at the same application day in and day out. Safari doesn't offer the features/add-ons I like in firefox.

It's an alternative, nothing more

donotreply@osnews.com (bousozoku) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 20:08:00 GMT

I don't care for Safari on Mac OS X or Windows but it's available and it keeps things moving again. It's also helped fuel other WebKit-enabled browsers.

No matter what Apple's reasoning is, it keeps Microsoft, Mozilla, and Opera thinking and that's always a good thing.

Hopefully, the few enhancements for Safari will spill over into Windows and create more of a following, just to keep complacency at a minimum.

Private browsing

donotreply@osnews.com (akro) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 20:28:00 GMT

I don't know of any other browsers on Windows that has it...

RE[3]: Windows...

donotreply@osnews.com (slight) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 20:37:00 GMT

The use of Windows-1252 encoding (and the other related ones) is perfectly valid, as long as it's not served as latin1 (iso-8859-1) or similar. It's this behaviour that's not allowed in FF strict mode I suspect. To be honest though for 99% of sites the proper solution would be to move to UTF-8.

RE

donotreply@osnews.com (Kroc) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 21:43:00 GMT

I'm Loving It.
The competitors are so blazingly far ahead of Microsoft, it sad watching Microsoft flounder around with X-ENABLE-LOCK-IN metas.

The standards have been around for so long now, dragging one's heels isn't good enough anymore, the web has finally made it onto mobile devices in the right format, and Microsoft are thankfully, not the ones controlling the forward motion now.

Firefox & Private Browsing Extensions

donotreply@osnews.com (linumax) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 21:46:00 GMT

I recommend these two:

Stealther:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1306

Distrust:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1559

and,

SecureBrowse
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5967

The last one takes a different approach but could give you some interesting levels of flexibility (has uses other than p0rn ).

PS: Apparently private browsing is planned for Firefox 3, check current status here:
http://wiki.mozilla.org/PrivateBrowsing#Current_Status Edited 2008-02-07 21:52 UTC

RE[3]: Windows...

donotreply@osnews.com (JrezIN) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 15:31:00 GMT

Besides that, Safari for Windows have terrible problems with accents. By using accents in web forms, it just ignores everything you wrote after the accent... not just forms, but and coping to clipboard to. Also, it didn't properly converted the line breaks to the correct (in Windows), leaving you with a bunch of characters to clean up...

But as far as I know, most of the problems are gone in the current versions of Safari for Windows.
I do use it from time to time to check some links when my Opera9 or Firefox3 windows are too populated... Or when Flash video playback bug (just stop after some seconds, have to click the seek bar all the time to continue the playback for some more seconds... it just sucks) prevents me from watching them in my browsers.