Apple has released the first version of its browser, Safari, for Windows. Safari 3.1, which was launched on Tuesday, will run on Windows XP or Vista and, of course, Mac OSX. Apple released a beta for the Windows-supporting version in June last year. Apple has claimed that the browser is the fastest available for Windows. In a Tuesday statement, Cupertino said it "loads web pages 1.9 times faster than [Internet Explorer] 7 and 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2 [and] runs JavaScript up to six times faster than other browsers". Don't think you have Safari for Windows installed? You might want to check again.
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Member since:2008-03-18
Member since:2006-03-10
Member since:2006-06-21
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.
Member since:2006-02-04
Member since:2006-02-04
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.
Member since:2006-10-28
Member since:2005-07-07
Member since:2007-03-04
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.
Member since:2008-03-17
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.
Member since:2006-11-01
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
Member since:2005-07-07
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.
Member since:2005-07-06
>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.
Member since:2005-07-12
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.
Member since:2005-07-23
Member since:
2006-02-06
I like that alternatives exist: Firefox, Opera, K-meleon, Konqueror and now Safari.
However, when Firefox 3 launches, the party will probably be over. It has so much more than what Safari is currently offering. Well perhaps you think this is a bold claim, but I've been using the betas since 3.0b2 currently using 3.04b and even compared to this beta, Safari feels a little old.
Edited 2008-03-20 22:15 UTC