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Safari 3 vs. Firefox 2 and IE7
Bobcat writes "Ars Technica has a 'first look' at Safari for Windows, which is interesting because it's written from the perspective of someone new to Safari. It was tested against Firefox 2 and IE7 and aside from the slightly faster page loading, Ars didn't find much to recommend it to Windows users. 'The modest increase in rendering performance is hardly worth the deficiencies, and Safari's user interface simply doesn't provide the usability or flexibility of competing products. If the folks at Apple think that providing Windows users with a taste of Mac OS X through Safari is going to entice them to buy a Mac, it's going to take a better effort than the Safari 3 beta. Even if the final release is more polished and completely bug-free, it still won't be as powerful or feature-loaded as Opera or Firefox.'"
I prefer Netscape Navigator 1.0. Simple, yet barely useable.
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
Seems like the reviewer basically said it doesn't do things the way he's used to FireFox doing them and that he doesn't like that. Not much that was useful in that review. IE was barely mentioned despite being in the title.
Since when are Safari's ever "bug free"?!?
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
Both Firefox and Opera are available on OS X as well yet most people use Safari. Personally, I don't have any use for any of the extra features in Opera of Firefox extensions.
What about lynx, or better yet, telnet 80???
Bonus points for running the javascript in your head.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
No, that's not what he said. He said that Safari ignores most Windows conventions. That's bad.
I don't respond to AC's.
Yes, less features and faster? Like a sports car rather than a bloody SUV?? I'll take TWO please!
The problem with Safari is that it is/was based on Konquerer which has always been flaky. Although Apple has done loads to improve it, it still stinks of Konquerer.
I have no idea why Apple didn't go with a Gecko based browser variant. It makes no sense because Mozilla/Firefox was the second most popular browser out there and would have given Safari a huge leg up. I mean Gecko already supports many cool things like PKCS#11, smartcards, extensions/plugins and all sorts of stuff like that plus people already were considering it when writing web sites. Safari still doesn't even have any way to install and manage plugins! (to install a plugin requires a manual install program and it will have no way to update itself)
You know, shills such as yourself make me want a Mac even LESS.
Congrats on failing at your job, you pathetic waste of life. DIAF.
not to mention being W3C compliant.
From what I found using Safari on Windows, it doesn't seem to support the basic of "tooltips" (aka the TITLE attribute of HTML).
I'm sure there are other things if I really tried to look.
I wonder if someone has run the ACID tests on it and how it did compared to FF, IE, and Opera?
What about compared to Konqueror or Safari Mac?
I've used Safari and Camino on MacOS X for quite some time, and generally use Firefox on Windows...and IE for work pages that won't render on anything else. But from spending an evening browsing around with Safari 3 beta for Windows, it doesn't seem to be nearly as peppy, and it actually had trouble with a couple videos on Apple's own site...which the Mac version didn't seem to catch on.
They've made it clear that this is BETA, though between so many releases of software feeling like beta tests and Google calling everything a beta for liability purposes...perhaps that description has lost its meaning.
Overall I agree with the article. It isn't YET worth Windows users switching. But I think that the feature set argument is poor...since Firefox, Opera, and IE are pretty bloated by 'features' in many respects. Perhaps Safari will be worthwhile at the release version, but for now it is the memory-hog, page-fault king. I'm sticking with Firefox.
Sorry Apple! I still love you.
I just downloaded Safari and although it's a nice looking and seemingly faster browser than Firefox and Internet Explorer, there are negative sides as well. I tested Safari with our web application and noticed that it didn't render text that was inside bold tags. Of course this is basically our own fault because our pages use XHTML 1.0 Transitional, and that standard doesn't have a bold tag. Then again this could be a good time to go over the code and fix it to more standard compatible.
:)
On a different note, after we have fixed our web application, I for one will be using Safari in all demonstrations. The Mac OSX look in buttons, text boxes and so on just adds that one thing to demonstration that makes our application to shine more.
PS. It would nice to hear if other people have had same kind of experiences with their net pages and web applications. If Safari has really dropped support for non-standard tags, this could explain quite much of its speed advantage.
Survey research tool for commercial and scientific use
It astounds me that Apple flips the bird to all of the Windows UI conventions for marketing purposes and nobody seems to care. Everything from their own anti-aliasing algorithm for text, their own custom widgets, to windows that you can only resize from the right corner. Of course, many legit Windows applications do the same thing, but it seems highly hypocritical of Apple to say, "you should stick to conventions when designing UIs" and then hardcode their own ideas in when developing on another platform.
It is ridiculous how many vendors insist on ignoring platform conventions for no good reason whatsoever. Why does every application have to have a God complex and say, "I'm so great, I'll put shortcuts in your start menu, quick launch, two tray icons (including an autoupdater) and now I have a custom UI so I look special." Whatever happened to programs just doing their job in an unobtrusive manner?
Sounds much like every Java app. A lot of GTK+ apps. On Mac: every app not written by Apple or Adobe (all 3 of them).
This is the reason why whenever people ask me what cross platform toolkit they should use I say: none. Write a GUI for each platform you want to support and use a common backend.. that way you are more likely to write a GUI that is suitable for the platform.
Of course, when they insist, I suggest they use Qt.
How we know is more important than what we know.
While I love the iTunes Music Store service, the iTunes software is a dog. It's slow, choppy, resource-intensive, and rarely loads the iPod on the first try. (I'm happy to give Vista a portion of the blame, but only so much.) Even worse, when I transferred my library across computers I had to edit the XML file myself to preserve my ratings and playcounts, and an undocumented change in the way iTunes handles certain older MP3s meant that nearly 500 files were lost. Because iTunes didn't report the error, it took me days just to figure out which files were missing from the library, and I had to re-encode them because iTunes will neither load them or report any error with the files. I still don't know what the problem was, and Apple's help desk was no help at all. I wouldn't accept such poor performance and nonexistent error-reporting from shareware, much less a flagship product that's intended to sell me on their systems.
I used to be on the bubble about switching; iTunes pushed me away from Apple instead of encouraging me to make the leap. I still use it, because the Music Store itself is perfect for my needs, but I'm not surprised to hear that Safari is a poor effort.
If Apple wants to encourage people to switch, perhaps it should make some its better applications available, at least in a limited form. I love Dashboard and Expose (I think those are the right names), and simple commercial versions of those for the Windows environment might convince people to try an OS with better, smoother versions of those features built in.
Hi,
Apple: Im a MAC
PC: and Im a PC
Apple: PC why do you have that colorful news page with customizable Ajax widgets on your shirt ?
PC: well thats my new web application loaded on Firefox ! I can get all my news, weather and sports media based on my preferences.
Apple: oh wow !, very nice...
PC: Mac would you like to try the new web application out?
Apple: I would love too, however my safari has a few dead animals and I can only support frames at this point... but I can play my ITunes waiting for the non-flash page to load and quicktime to boot up!
PC: Sheesh.. and he calls me bloated...
...isn't to entice people to buy a Mac.
It's to act as a development vehicle for iPhone, since all third party iPhone apps will be rich Web 2.0/AJAX applications.
On this topic, such applications can indeed have the look and feel of iPhone applications, and have access to all iPhone internal services, such as phone dialing, access to maps functionality, and any other iPhone services.
This isn't just, "Oh, let's bring out Safari for Windows for the hell of it, and let people see how good of a browser it is, and maybe they'll buy a Mac!"
This is the "SDK" for iPhone.
one faith, one land, one volk, one fuhrer!! zeig heil!
Does it come with a brown shirt?
Honestly, given the browser market on the PC right now, I highly doubt Apple designed Safari for Windows to give PC users a taste of OS X. More likely it is being released as a market test, and to give mac users who use safari regularly on their macs access to their browser when they are on Windows.
You are who you are, let no one tell you different. But, never close your mind to a new point of view.
Apple's Windows application where buggy in order to make people think "this looks nice, i'll buy a Mac so that it also works".
...of an iPhone "application" (view in Safari).
While it might be disappointing that there isn't a true iPhone SDK that lets developers write native apps to OS X/iPhone frameworks, 1.) "Web 2.0"/AJAX applications can be advanced in functionality, and still have access to all of iPhone's services, and 2.) it's not written in stone that there will NEVER be an iPhone SDK or some mechanism or process for adding native applications to iPhone. But the above app is just a quick and dirty example of what can be done.
One thing you should keep in mind when testing the beta, is that it appears to be very broken on localized version of Windows XP; that is any language version except the US one.
I've tried browsing quite a few sites yesterday, including sites like youtube, slashdot, and quite a few news-sites (computer-related as well as mainstream newspaper websites), and so on. It didn't crash on me once.
However, I've heard from a few people who tried it on the Dutch localized version of Windows XP (SP2 of course), and they say it crashes frequently, renders pages with horrible flaws, e.g. bold text does not appear at all and similar very obvious rendering problems. However, I visited some of those same pages using the US version of Windows and they looked just fine.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
Quicktime for Windows is still full of bugs and crashes a lot. They totally ignore critical features for Windows like that ability to drag and drop. And that's after it's been available for years.
They are just not interested in providing quality software on Windows.
Just out of curiosity, could we maintain some consistency here on the front page? Currently, you are showing two headlines: and My concern is your abbreviation of the word 'versus.' I think that when putting it into a headline, it is common to use the capitalized form with no period (as in 'Vs'). Really, I don't care what you pick, it's just more friendly to the eye when it is consistent.
Just thought I'd request that. Good editing helps your credibility whether you're the New York Times or 'some tech site.'
Maybe because Safari isn't trying to be a feature-loaded browser for "Power Users"? Apple makes elegant software that does everything needed and not an ounce more. Its design is to keep things simple, straightforward, and easy for your average user to pick up.
For example, which is more elegant: MusicMatch or iTunes? iTunes, of course. MusicMatch has more features, but it's a clunky beast because of it. Same with Safari. A minimalist approach that focuses on usability rather than obscure features.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Ars is being rather presumptious here.
Maybe I stand alone on this, but when I first read about the Safari 3 launch for Windows, my 1st thought was "Cool, finally Windows based web developers can test against Safari". It never once crossed my mind that it would be something that would woo Joe Sixpack or even get much attention at all from the mainstream Windows user base.
Considering the only times I have issues with having Safari as my primary browser is with heavy AJAX stuff, getting the browser in front of developers seems a logical step to improve the existing Safari users experience.
Perhaps we can finally see an AJAX HTML/TEXT editor that works in Safari with version 3's new features and Windows support.
So hey Ars, Safaris appearance on the Windows platform has a definite value. Just not in the obvious ways you're thinking of.
I agree. Unless Safari manages some magical plug-i compatibility with Firefox, it is unlikely to ever be as feature-loaded as Opera or Firefox. don't think Apple is aiming at "feature loaded" so much as "better for normal users." Most users don't care if they can create granular block lists and flip javascript on and off quickly, because most users don't do those things. Safari seems to be aiming at the crowd who wants simple and fast. As for power, well that all depends upon your needs and workflow. Maybe I need to have really easy access to a grammar checker, but I don't know squat about configuring computer programs. With Safari, it "just works" (or does it, on the OS X version it does, not sure about Windows). A real world example of power is taking screenshots of Web UIs. This is something I have to do now and again. In the past, I've used OmniWeb because it allowed me to recode the pages on the fly easily, so I could fudge the sizes of text boxes and eliminate useless whitespace (thereby making a clearer, larger image). With Safari 3, I can just drag those text boxes to the size I want, which is more powerful yet and more usable.
For other workflows, I'm sure Firefox or Opera is more powerful. Apple is aiming at the bulk of users, instead of at all users. I don't now if such an approach will work though, on Windows. The average person on Windows doesn't know anything about browsers and will never download Safari, so unless Apple has a way to get it onto desktops, their seeming target audience and likely target audience are quite different.
This is a year ago:
I always had troubles creating webpages that looked acceptible in both IE and firefox. And when I managed to let these show the pages like I intended, konqueror positioned everything slightly different. For instance an '#sectionX img:hover {width: XXXpx;}' in CSS gave much trouble. The same with body-margins and the like.
What is it like nowadays?
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
My biggest problem with Safari is the toolbar search. Apple has decided that I only need Google. Firefox and even IE allow me to change the default engine and add other search providers if I want. In the PC version Beta it had an option to select Yahoo which is a start. But when I loaded the beta on my Mac I was disappointed to find this option missing.
The only reason I would ever use Safari is to download Firefox on a new Mac. I just find Safari to be annoying and too "plain Jane".
I gave this a try for most of the afternoon, yesterday, on my XP box at work.
For a very first attempt releasing the browser for Windows, it's ok, in my opinion. You have to start somewhere... But right now, no - it's not exactly going to win a lot of users over from Firefox or even IE.
The ability to drag a tab out to form a new window is pretty slick, but of questionable usefulness most of the time. Faster rendering and launching of Java applets is always a plus, but just like Ars concluded, it's not important relative to stability and compatibility.
I was able to crash Safari on several occasions just by doing things like hitting the "back" button a couple times after submitting a form on a page and getting dialog boxes popping up asking if I was sure I wanted to re-submit it. I haven't tried it yet myself, but I've also read that it has some bugs with printing multiple pages to a printer if you tell it to start anywhere but on page 1.
I didn't think Safari's text rendering looked quite as "crisp" or easy to read as Firefox or IE does in Windows either. (On a Mac, it looks fine to me, by comparison.)
All in all though, I don't see why anyone would think this release is a "bad" thing? It's free, for starters - and it allows a hard-core Safari-using Mac owner to feel very comfortable if he/she has to browse on a Windows box on occasion. It surely needs testers to keep reporting bugs in it, so it can be improved. But by the time it gets to a release version and out of beta, I think it has potential to be at least another solid, free browser choice for Windows -- if not really a "superior" one.
nothing more....if you care to use it daily great otherwise we want developer folks to use it to create applets for the safari that will run on the new iPhone.... as there really is no other need for it to be released at this point to the other 95% of pc users....
Historically, mosquito netting was the best you could expect to keep the bugs out. Hardly seems sporting, old boy.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
Looks like Ars are keen to get Google's Safari 3 clicks, what with the way that the Safari 3 article about Safari 3 mentions Safari 3 so much...
-1 not first post
Sadly, the interface is completely blank. No text, no menus, just a gray metal shell with an empty white window. After the first 3 seconds, the entire application uses 100% of my cpu and effectively locks up my computer.
Not sure where the conflict lies.
And, for that matter, Office 2007. I'm using the Safari beta at home, alongside Firefox. Yeah, it doesn't follow some windows conventions. Some of the defaults seem like odd choices (the statusbar defaults to not being displayed, for instance.)
But its certainly usable, and it has a lot of nice little nifties compared to other browsers: highlighting active fields is very nice. And the page loading speed isn't a small improvement, either. Bonjour is interesting, too, though many home users probably won't notice it or get much use out of it. I'm not sure I'm going to switch over to Safari as may main windows browser, but its certainly got my interest.
That isn't surprising, because it doesn't seem like "feature-loaded" was Apple's goal (is it ever?). There's probably a market for a fast and safe(r) browser to replace IE. You might say that Opera fits this bill quite well, but Apple's marketing will mean that less technical users will hear about Apple's new Windows browser. Apple has never been about including tons of features; they've always seemed to include the most popular features and add some UI polish (which doesn't fit in very well with Windows, IMO).
That being said, I was personally a little surprised by this announcement. iTunes allows iPods and the iTMS to work on Windows, hugely expanding the available market. Quicktime means that videos can be viewed on most computers. What does Safari mean? If a website is designed to work with Firefox, it'll probably work with Safari. Do they care enough to have websites start saying, "Please upgrade to IE v. X, Firefox v. Y, or Safari v. Z to view this site properly"?
When Safari comes out of beta, I wouldn't be surprised to see a Safari + iTunes + Quicktime bundle as one (default) download when you visit Apple's site.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Does anyone expect the submitter think Apple's plan is for Safari to become the dominant browser on Windows? That's not what this is about. With Safari on Windows, web developers using Windows machines will be able to see how most Macs and all iPhones will browse their site.
Not considering platform quirks (like the anti-aliasing issue), Firefox totally destroys Safari, mainly because of plugins. If Apple could stimulate more plugin development, I would use it. But the huge plugin dev community for Firefox is one of the main reasons I stick with it--the usefulness of the plugins is beyond reproach.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
O.k. obviously Slashdot users are the exception (and yes I bet most slashdot users to run windows, they need it for their games). The Windows users that Apple is going after are people like my wife.
I quote, "I don't want a bunch of stuff. I want to browse the web.", further I quote, "I want to insert the memory thingy and have Windows just import the pictures".
My mother is the same way. To them, a computer is just a utility, like a toaster. They want it to work, and work without fuss and like it or not, they don't need tabs, they don't need extensions. They need web browsing, pop up and maleware free. That's it.
Get your PostgreSQL here: http://www.commandprompt.com/
http://larholm.com/2007/06/12/safari-for-windows-0 day-exploit-in-2-hours/
l
These bugs have been verified in the current PRODUCTION copy on OSX (Safari 2.0.4):
http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2007/06/niiiice.htm
I love my Mac, but several times a day the Safari web browser crashes (Sorry, "Closes Unexpectedly") for no reason. This is especially frustrating when I go back and click on the exact same link or attempt to do the same action (watch a youtube video, etc) and the browser crashes again in the same way.
Yeah, that's why I hardly ever open Safari, even though I'm a Mac User now. I still use firefox, just like I did on windows, and before that mozilla. It is largely because its what I'm used to, but for me there's no great reason to change. It's not like I'm using Internet Explorer or something! If somebody showed that an alternative was noticibly more secure, or had a major feature advantage, I'd use it. Until then, Firefox is good enough.
I remember using email gateways to send Telnet and FTP commands to servers, and then wait for the response hoping I did it right. :) I was a kid too, and waiting a day or two just to see if my cool new Star Trek wallpaper -- broken up into UUencoded pieces, of course -- had arrived successfully was as much as I could bear.
;)
So anyway, using telnet through an email gateway to read Websites, that's how a man does it.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Yes, less features and faster? Like a sports car rather than a bloody SUV?? I'll take TWO please!
Sorry I prefer a sports car with features.
There is a reason that all new 'technologies' are usually available on the GM Corvette before they are introduced on other GM vehicles.
Of course some people prefer cars like the first generation Dodge Viper, which had almost no features, not even power windows or a credible radio option. It was fast 0-60, but 0-100 the Corvette was actually faster because of the technology GM used. The Corvette also had Bose sound, integrated dash computer, and all the FLUFF of luxury cars.
Why do Apple products have to be FREAKING minimalist? Didn't Apple use to be known as 'luxury'?
If Apple thinks people are going to 'give up' features to have the 'privilege' of using Apple products, then Apple is insane or delusional. Oh wait, I have see the iPhone ads compared to the featureless iPhone specs, I think Apple is insane.
Slashdot = Lots of Car analogies...
(PS If Steve Jobs is your deity, then mark this post -1.)
"Even if the final release is more polished and completely bug-free, it still won't be as powerful or feature-loaded as Opera or Firefox."
But will the average user CARE.
It's pretty simple when you think about it. Safari on Windows is for people who have Macs at home but use PC's at work. If that's the case, then it doesn't matter if it doesn't follow Windows conventions. For the most part, it's what people who use Safari at home on the Mac are used to. In my office of 4 people, 3 of us use Macs at home, but have a Win XP machine at work. Currently, all 3 of us use Firefox, but when Safari is stable, my bet is that all 3 of us will use it as our default browser. If something like that happens, it could give the appearance of Safari almost doubling it's market share overnight.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Since yesterday I've been trying Safari on Windows, and it's simply unusable. In a lot of websites, half of the text won't be display, due to what seems to be CSS tags. Basically a typical article on Slashdot looks like "______ _____ from the dept."
Also, adding a bookmark using menu Bookmarks>Add a bookmark crashes Safari. So how can we compare Safari, that is hardly usable, to FF2 and IE7, which are both very usable and stable?
You just got troll'd!
Aaaargh. OK. Wake up. Smell the roses. Apple isn't trying to deploy a browser, OS, mail client or anything else for the 0.5% of the population that use every bell, whistle and widget inside tools. They're trying to deploy a set of products that do what they are intended to do - very very well - with enough functionality for 99.5% of the user base. Simple effective solutions. Don't underestimate it. BaseCamp, 30 Boxes, etc are pitiable in the functionality department. They just do 1-2 things very well and very simply.
If the Windows conventions were good, I'd agree with you. However, anything is an improvement over Windows conventions.
Come on; it's shocking as a Mac user to see all you Windows guys suddenly defending Safari now that it's available on your PC's. A lot of Mac users hate Safari. Many of us use Firefox.
Safari on Mac doesn't follow Mac conventions either. It just received its first update in like a year, and it doesn't seem to have helped much. Safari:Mac = IE:Windows. We feel pretty much the same way about it.
I use Safari on Mac only to test; that's about all it's good for, but its rendering engine always makes things look significantly different than any other browser so, like IE, as a designer you kind of just have to accept its quirks. I run Firefox as my primary browser on both Mac and PC.
btw, I did try Safari on Windows. The first time I opened more than 10 tabs simultaneously, it froze. Yes, it's a beta, but a pretty unusable one if it fails at its basic core function.
Adblock is the reason every mac I use runs Firefox, and it's the reason all my windows-using friends who have moved away from IE went to Firefox.
Without adblock, I can't see Safari for windows being much more than a dev tool for iPhone apps.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Deleted
When I switched from Linux to OSX last year, I immediately installed Firefox because that's what I'd been using before. A first look at Safari found several things "missing" that I felt I needed. There's a lot to dislike about the Mac implementation of Firefox 2.0, but it was at least something I knew.
Then I was at a conference, and the guy sitting next to me was using a MacBook Pro. We started comparing notes, with him extolling the virtues of Safari. After getting a few misconceptions cleared up, I started to look deeper into it. A trip to the Mac store to talk to one of the "Geniuses" led me to http://www.pimpmysafari.com/. I'm working on getting all the pieces installed that I want, but it looks like I can make Safari into the browser I want it to be.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
What a surprise.
A lack luster review of an Apple product from Ars Technica.
Even when a product has no glaring faults they just cannot bring themselves to say anything positive about it. Just look at their past reviews if you need proof.
But here we have a review about a Beta product and comparing it to Finals. Then complain about issues that are often a by product of being a Beta. That's objective.
By the by, I use both Firefox AND Safari. I enjoy the use of both products.
-- What's this '-r *' file doing here? -- Oh well, a simple 'rm' should do the trick.
Safari on XP is there to encourage Windows people to develop for the iPhone (in the limited form of development that is allowed...) It really does not matter if no-one uses it for web browsing.... As long as it is there for download if they want/need it....
Safari 3 on Mac now has 'cat off a hot tin roof' javascript speed. This is a really, really big deal if you use a lot of google maps mashups with hundreds of markers or other google apps that are js heavy. It beats Camino (previous champ) hands down.
For those web-apps for which "the browser is the OS", running Safari is like upgrading your computer, particularly for users on older Macs...
Question to the XP crowd - is Safari the fastest browser for Windows when running complex google maps mashups?
The release of safari 3 has allowed me to delay the purchase of a replacement desktop machine. That is a far bigger deal for me than Leopard.
Find Japanese addresses in English on Google Maps Japan: http://diddlefinger.com/
I was excited to download Safari because someone told me in a /. comment a few weeks ago that my blog template was garbled in that browser. I've loaded up my blog on a few Windows computers using Safari and it looks 99% correct to me (some text is bolded that oughtn't be) - nothing like the very scrambled screenshot that kind gentleman supplied me with a few weeks back.
Can anyone here with both OSX and WinXP versions of Safari vouch for the similarity in the rendering engine? For reference, my URL is http://blog.demodulated.com/ and I've verified that it's nearly identical in IE in WinXP and Vista, FF2.0 in XP and Vista and Ubuntu Edgy Feisty, and Konqueror in Ubuntu Edgy and Feisty.
I use Firefox on my OS X machines, and most of my coworkers do too. It's just bizzar to me that Apple would even work so hard to release something like this. I've read it's to grow their developer market for iPhone apps, but they weren't even going to allow that sort of thing in the beginning.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
For some reason people tend to see this as a browser alternative (which it is usable for), but the real value of this is that it allows developers to target the iPhone with their development. Apple has declared that Safari is the browser on the iPhone, and that we should write Ajax applications for it.
:)
So, instead of calling it "Safari for Windows" they should just call it "iPhone SDK for Windows" and the original article would never even have been considered
--
Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen "...and...Tubular Bells!"
First of all... its a beta (so you better believe it has deficiencies!). Second of all, they didn't do it to give Windows users a taste of OS X, but to widen the developer base for iPhone web apps, and because Google pays Apple every time someone uses the Safari Google thingy.
The Admin and the Engineer
"The Federal Reserve is a fraudulent system."--Lew Rockwell
End The FED. -
There are certainly issues with Firefox on OS X, but I prefer to run it very simply as a means to make the web a viable place for applications and standards based browsing in the future. Rarely now do I come across a site that tells me that Explorer is needed to access the content.
Safari is not bad, Webkit is nothing if not cool, but ultimately a better solution is available. I wish that Apple would simply help merge Webkit into Mozilla, and ditch the browser fragmentation game. Goodness knows that Mozilla could use some interface help.
Alas, Steve simply wants a solid Apple platform, but I agree that Safari is doing little to pull Windows users across. But, what if iTunes ran as a plugin within Safari, and you could access your music at work? Or, your documents? What if the recent exploits where an indication that more is going on in the browser than anticipated?
So you're a Mac-fanboy-fanboy? What an entertaining life you must lead. Remember, people are laughing _with_ you even if they are pointing their finger at you.
Open multiple Gmail accounts at once /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -ProfileManager \ /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari \ /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari \
Fri, Jun 8 '07 at 7:30AM PDT Submitted by gand macosxhints.com
I like to have more than one Gmail account open at the same time. As you can't have more than one in the same browser, I use Firefox's ProfileManager flag to manage one profile for each Gmail account. Type in terminal:
https://mail.google.com/mail/
The first time you do this, you'll create a new profile, one for each of your Gmail accounts. Launch this command each time you wish to open a new account. The Dock will display multiple Firefox icons, one for each open profile. If you wish, you can check "Remember me on this computer." As Firefox passwords are not managed by Keychain, you can store one for each of your accounts. You can also do this in Safari. Type in terminal:
https://mail.google.com/mail/
Each time you launch this command, a new instance of Safari will open. You can then login to a different Gmail account in each. If Safari is not your default browser, use a gmail.webloc file instead of a URL:
path/to/file/gmail.webloc
(Just drag your browser's Gmail favicon to the desktop, and then onto your Terminal window). The Dock will display multiple Safari icons, one for each open instance.
blah, blah, blah...
What if Apple introducing Safari for Windows was not about enticing people to buy a Mac? What if it was something like this... Apple resurrects GNUStep to make truly attractive cross-platform applications using Objective-C? They release Safari as a proof of concept application. Next, they release the XCode cross-platform developer kit. If I could develop on my Mac in something other than Java and have well-behaved non-braindead-widgeted cross-platform apps (I'm looking at you, WX), I would do it.. and I suspect a large number of us developer-types who have recently switched would do the same. So then we have some percentage of new software written either on the Mac or portable to the Mac platform without much effort. Yes, I know Qt can sort of already do this. But last time I checked, I had to use Visual Studio to compile a Windows port for it. That put me off a bit.
The point of all this is NOT to sell Macs. The point is to get websites to design their sites to be Safari compatible, so that the iPhone works better. The point as well is to give companies the ability to build a webapp that works on Macs, Windows, and iPhone. This will help sell the iPhone to cooperations looking for the next blackberry replacement. Its an obvious move really.
I use SeaMonkey on most of my machines except my 500-MHz G4, 384-MB RAM, Lombard PowerBook (running Tiger).
This is a pretty slow computer for what I have running on it and I have to give thought to how I use it. For normal web browsing, it's Safari because of how lean Safari runs.
Has anyone compared the browsers on 500-MHz, 384MB-RAM PC laptops? How about jumping between open apps when different browsers are running (testing virtual memory economics?)
--Richard
The article says that numerous security flaws have already been found in Safari 3. I have to wonder if this is the result of Apple's developers being accustomed to the "safe" Mac environment, where it makes little difference if there are any flaws in software, as the flaws won't be exploited anyway. The Windows environment is an entirely different situation, and Apple devs aren't used to it. (I know Apple makes QuickTime player and iTunes for Windows, but those are relatively closed systems compared to a general purpose web browser (although even QuickTime player has had security updates.) We know from the huge amount of security flaws Apple has had to address this year, that they've been used to releasing vulnerable software, and getting away with it. That doesn't play in the Windows world.
This is like alien of a germ-free planet, and therefore having no immune system, deciding to visit earth and getting infected with viruses, bacteria, germs, and whatnot, within minutes of his arrival.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
In my experience, the only "Mac users" who prefer Firefox to Safari are people who never used a Mac until recently. And let's be honest—Firefox would be okay for a PC application, but by Mac standards, it's absolutely terrible. Firefox is a very literal-minded PC port that doesn't think or act like a native Mac application. I remember the same happening with the Mac port of Word 6, which was designed to approach tasks the same way as the Windows version. Native Mac users considered it shit, but ex-PC users of that era didn't seem to mind.
If you're serious about entering the Mac market, the key is not to just "port" it, but to attempt a faithful but thorough translation. Sometimes you'll need to rethink your application from top to bottom, because Mac users and PC users have very different ways of approaching problems.
Make Slashdot readable! See journal.
In addition to the weird nonstandard GUI, the human interface is archaic as well. I've owned 5-button mice for many years and am very used to browsing back and forward with the thumb and pinky buttons on my Intellimouse Optical. Not only does Safari not respond when I click these buttons, but even clicking or dragging the mouse wheel button does nothing! If Apple is trying to convince me of the superiority of simplistic 2-button mice I must not be getting something.
Apple and MS have very different philosophical approaches for text rendering. Microsoft attempt to make the text as readable as possible on an LCD screen, to the detriment of the original font design. Apple preserve the font design to the detriment (for some people, I like it) of the readability.
The main reason MS fonts look lighter is that Cleartype renders to pixel boundaries - if the font would naturally go over a pixel boundary when anti-aliased, Cleartype does not render that. The fonts end up looking "lighter" on screen because of it. Apple don't do that. As far as I know, It has nothing to do with colour and black & white.
The upshot is that MS text appears lighter (they even designed fonts to match their rendering philosophy) than Apple text under most circumstances. It also means that the print output on a Mac looks very similar to the displayed output, whereas printing an MS document can make it look a lot "heavier" because the rendering on print is different from the rendering on display.
As for 'proprietary', both rendering engines are 'proprietary'. I don't see why you call one that, and not the other.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
But it was not supposed to be bloated out of the box. And that's the point!
Best "String" Ever!
While I won't use Safari on Windows much, I do welcome the addition.
I like to see the browser market filled with different choices so people can decide for themselves what they want.
After all I do not want to go back to the days when there were not much to choose from. So the more the merrier.
Just hope Apple will remain committed and see the beta version evolve to a working, vibrant browser.
I performed a simple test. I opened linuxtoday.com in firefox, internet explorer, and safari. I ignored the perpetual Microsoft advertisements plastered in the right corner of the linux web site. I then ctrl-clicked on each of the first four articles, opening them in tabs. I followed the same procedure in each. I then closed the application, and measured the difference in total system memory usage:
Safari: 51M
Internet Explorer: 34M
Firefox: 28M
Firefox also had about 12 different RSS bookmark feeds loaded; Safari had 3 it looked like, and IE had none.
I'm a Mac user and a huge fan of Apple's, but I completely agree that's bad.
One of the most frustrating things about using Firefox in OS X is that it looks and feels horribly wrong because it ignors most Mac conventions*.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
I was prepared to call the article FUD before reading it... but then I noticed that it's Ars so I read it, and not only do the complaints seem valid, I don't even understand what Apple was thinking with some of the issues. For example, porting the OS X antialiasing over to Windows rather than using the native ClearType just seems weird (almost to the extent that I don't believe Ars Technica).
*Yes, I know about Camino, but that doesn't diminish my point.
I would like to point out that I am a Mac user, and one of those rare nuts that participates at a Mac users group down at my local library; where we both provide free support to people who want it, but more importantly we help people who have just gotten Macs and want to learn how to use them.
What I would like to say is that while Safari is a fine browser, it is not a GOOD browser. It lacks quite a number of very useful features, that leads many people to choose Camino over it. There are add-ons that can be purchased, but those are not 'Safari', and they are not going to be part of the Safari experience Windows users will experience should they even bother to try.
It is too bad that Safari was released for another platform, because it really doesn't represent the functionality and flexibility that so many other great applications do on the Macintosh platform.
What this really states more than anything is that Apple need to look BEYOND page rendering, and start adding features so that Safari can compete with; Firefox, Camino, Opera, and yes even Internet Explorer 7.
I am open source, and Linux baby!
"I heard your dad went into a restaurant and ate everything in the restaurant and they had to close the restaurant."
I don't use Windows, and the presence of Safari on Windows is not going to seduce me into switching from OS X.
On OS X, I spend most of my with Safari because it has fewer annoyances than any other browser I use. The latest Camino release is very good, but not quite enough for me to use exclusively. Firefox is a better browser on Windows than on OS X. All the Gecko-based browsers I've tried on OS X are slow to return the cursor when you open a new tab when several are already open, and they all are frustratingly too precise about cursor hover location when doing the middle-button-to-open bit.
And, Safari's text display is better than the others.
Meanwhile... isn't comparing a Safari beta to two full releases just a tad unfair.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
But it comes with a free frogurt!
Didn't perceive any dramatic performance improvement. I'm not surprised because the box I used is fast and however many fewer milliseconds it takes Safari to do something is overwhelmed by the time spent waiting on network traffic. I noted that Safari commits more RAM than either FF or IE. From memory, on startup; 32M for Safari, low 20s for FF and less for IE (18M?). Safari and FF both bring their own GUI framework overhead to the table while IE hides (shares) at lot of its weight, but that still seems like a lot; reminds me of Navigator.
This is a beta of course. On the other hand, today beta often means "not supported" as opposed to "not release quality." iTunes on Windows isn't bug-free or particularly efficient either. Kudos on plug-in compatibility; I noted that several of mine worked out-of-the-box. Not easy to do. Bloody freaking miracle, in fact.
Question: I tried to use Yahoo's hyper Ajax mail system in Safari. Didn't work too well (things not rendering, generally non-functional.) Does it "work" on a Mac with Safari? The question is more about Yahoo than Safari really; writing off a large fraction of users for all that Ajax goodness (?) seems like a bad idea.
Another Question: Where the $explicative is the home button? How did that fall out favor? Yeah, I know about the menu pick and the key-combo. Want a home button, like every other browser for the past 14 odd years. Maybe it's right in front of me and I'm just too uncool to spot it, but there I am...
YAQ: How to turn off link underlining? That led me to dig around in preferences, which I noted were very sparse. I suppose a lot of that stuff is normalized into global OS X preferences.
I use all sorts of platforms (except OS X) so FF is the natural choice; near-browser parity on everything I have to use. Safari would have to be so compelling that it actually makes me accept limiting myself to Windows, and it isn't.
Glad to see Apple do this; one more reason, in addition to the iPhone, for site builders to make their stuff work well across browsers.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
I'm still not understanding why I should check out Safari on XP, even though I'm curious to do so. I've got a fairly well-tuned nicely customized Firefox 2 with a bunch of extensions and a skin I like. What is Safari going to offer me that's better? Heck AdBlock alone on FF is worth the price of admission.
To those that say Firefox is bloated and slow now: how many extensions and plugins are you running? The point of Firefox wasn't necessarily to be small and lightweight always, though I would bet that the basic vanilla Firefox *is* small and lightweight. But it was made to be able to be extended - if you add on a bunch of crap, it's probably going to add some overhead. Personally, I have a ton of scripts and extensions, and have no issues with speed or the application, rendering, or with stability. It is an all around rock solid browser. It still doesn't sound like Safari, beta or no, or any other browser can match what I have set up, and that's the point.
As for the iPhone/Webkit development, I still don't understand that, either. If it's supposed to be cross platform and just web/ajax code, why do you need a specific browser to work with it? How would that be any different from IE-only sites? And if it's cross platform, why couldn't you use Firefox or IE or Opera to develop iPhone web apps, too? What am I missing?
Ah, but with adblock and other extensions, my SUV of a browser is like I have a howitzer mounted on it, taking out billboards before I can see them. Yeah, I'll get there a bit slower than you, but I'll have a much better time on the trip.
I do some web development, so I immediately downloaded it to see how my employer's site functioned in Safari.
Here's my take:
Immediately impressed by the lack of waste of screen real estate. There hardly seemed any side and bottom borders in the rendering area, making the page just seem larger. (I've since turned on the status bar, but for other reasons.)
I actually like the font rendering. It just looks softer and more comforting. This is purely an aesthetic judgment though.
The menus were neat. Nice visual eye candy with all of the rolling and stuff. In a similar vein, the glow around active form elements is very noticeable (a good thing).
No options. Like I said, I do some web development. I was looking for the Javascript console/debugger/anything, and I couldn't find out how to activate that. Can someone please tell me if this is even available on Winfari.
Tab bar hidden by default. Tabbed browsing is to high speed connections as a crack pipe is to crack. Hiding that and making me explicitly turn it on is bad.
No new tab button anywhere.
Ctrl-Tab doesn't cycle through my tabs as it does in Firefox and IE.
Middle-clicking a tab doesn't close it (but middle-clicking on links still opens them).
Of course, this is Safari 3 _BETA_ and I hope that Apple is going to correct/change these things in future releases.
My twitter
That's good!
Itunes since version 4 has been a beast on windows, I had switched to it (from Winamp) because it honestly seemed the best music player, but its got bigger, slower and more encumbered since version 4 was released. I'm actually using windows media player 11 right now because it provides me with the features I want in a music player (sync music to phone), its quick and handles all media.
I *tried* to use iTunes once also but find it really horrible. I felt as if I just cant do anything with my music library, in that way i felt iTunes similar to what what the GNOME ppl do (remove every feature for the sake of "simplicity" until you cant do anything). I used to use Windows Media Player also, which I really hate. Usually I returned to barebones Winamp... (I've got my 60GB mp3/ogg/flac/ape media library ordered by folders/subfolders).
All that nightmare was ended when I found MediaMonkey from another poster here in Slashdot. I have been using it for almost one year and I wont look back anytime soon.
As a side rant, my brother is visiting me in the UK, he's got an iPod (I dont like them for the lockdown and DRM, I have a great OGG/MP3 Samsung YPZ5)... he was making fun of me because of my "hatred" against apple... until he needed to delete some songs from his iPod... and the only way to do that? using iTunes... but as I do not like Apple software (not iTunes, nor Quicktime...) I do not have it installed in my computer... therefore he is locked out, with his piece of shit brick until he can find a PC that allows him to install iTunes... on the other hand every PC where I connect my el-cheapo YPZ5 sees it as a external memory and I can add and delete music as I please without downloading any spyware or adware.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
HYou miss the point. Having a custom look is one thing; violating basic Windows usability conventions, such as being able to resize a window from any point on the window border, having the close button catchment area extend to the top right hand pixel of the screen when maximized, having a window menu in the top left corner that can also be bought up with alt+space etc. is another.
Yes, lots of Windows apps have their own different look. But no matter how different an application's toolbar/ribbon/buttonclickthingy is from the standard OS one, it can always be accessed from the keyboard by pressing alt. No matter how strange and colourful the close button in the top right corner is, the catchment area always extends to the top right hand pixel when the app is maximized. Etc, etc, you get the idea: interface conventions can be and are broken often and wilfully; usability conventions are not. Learn the difference.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
Woooooosh
Responding en masse here.
If this is just meant as an SDK, then most of my complaints are totally invalid. However, I do not see it presented that way on the Apple site: "the world's best browser" it claims. Not the best browser for iPhone developers. I really think this is a sort of cognitive backpedaling on lots of people's part to make up for the several deficiencies that Safari has demonstrated in its short stay over in the fun world of Windows. (sarcasm) The range of arguments I've heard only serve to strengthen this point, because some say that it is the first of many applications to come to Windows. This is a good thing.
If Safari wants to be a serious contender in the browser arena, then it has serious polish work to do, beta or not. (A hyped beta release might as well be a real release.)
Well i'm new to safari .. and tested it today on our application adopted to IE.
Rendering speed makes impression. Firefox sux period. IE sux period.
Anyroadup, I find Safari perfectly usable (and I've been using web browsers since Mosaic).
Believe it: they're right.
For what it's worth, I think OS X's antialiasing looks better for web page text rendering than ClearType on Windows, so it doesn't bother me in the slightest. I'm not crazy about how the UI doesn't fit in with other Windows applications (particularly the fact that it doesn't respect user font choices), but the pages themselves look aesthetically better than they do on any Windows-based browser, IMO.
Sean Daugherty "I have walked in Eternity -- and Eternity weeps."
Of course some people prefer cars like the first generation Dodge Viper, which had almost no features, not even power windows or a credible radio option. It was fast 0-60, but 0-100 the Corvette was actually faster because of the technology GM used.
A lie.
i honestly think the only reason they released this for windows was to allow people to test their iPhone apps without buying a mac. who cares that there's one more browser for windows. as has be stated ad nauseum it doesn't bring that much to the table for browsing; "private[porn] mode" and slightly faster rendering. a few people may try it, but if you haven't switched from IE yet, this isn't going to be the thing that gets you to
no i have not shot my gun in the air and gone 'Ahh!'
"Why do Apple products have to be FREAKING minimalist?"
;) I'm not even sure they bothered changing in recent years but I know I managed to plug in my 5 button mouse on a G4 server I was forced to administrate a few months ago, and the mouse worked to some degree at least.
Have you taken a good look at their mouse design up till the last few years?
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
In Soviet Russia, Windows users complain that ported Mac applications ignore native UI conventions.
It is so obvious... IE is already at v7 cleary releases ahead of the other two... and even though Safari just came out on WinTel it's already at v3 blowing past Firefox. Just think if IE incremented their version number for every bug. It would be at v410607 showing it's superiority.
Right on! How dare the parent provide us with an opinion and information, FIE ON HIM FIE FIE FIE!
crap.
I have both mac and PC at home, and even on my mac i still run firefox over safari.
I am not a web dev so i couldnt give a rats ass about coding standards. I just want a browser that works with everything that gives me control over what pages i want to allow acive content with.
For me that is firefox with NoScript and AdBlock.
I remember trying safari when i first got my mac and being complely unimpressed with it.
I do like the idea of a lightweight broweser, but if it has no tolerance for sloppy coding then i will just have to switch browsers anyways to to to the page i want.
For me, safari being ported to windows is just as useless as internet exploiter ported to mac.
... then may I introduce to you the future of Safari on Windows:
....
http://pimpmysafari.com/
Safari is extensible. It'll just take time, and a bit of sweat
IE7 wins because 7 is the largest prime number of 3, 2, and 7.
While Macs are popular with web designers, it's less than 50% of them anyway (although higher than 4.4% in general for users). Developing websites on a Mac is easy, develop to standards, test with Safari/Firefox, with slight workarounds for Firefox, then add some hacks for IE, and away you go. For Windows developers, historically they wrote to IE and then hacked for the others, which is way more work.
If Windows-based Web developers can use Safari, they can either develop to standards and hack for IE better, or at least test their hacks for Firefox/Safari on their machine.
I can fire up Parallels and test against IE, Windows guys had no way to test against Safari before Monday.
So there are two direct strategic benefits for Apple. Had Firefox existed before Safari, I don't know that Apple would have bothered with a browser, but once the spent the time/money to develop it, they might as well keep the revenue stream from the Google search box by keeping the Browser up to date (I doubt it's more than 2m-3m/year in development costs at most), as it's a profitable business, and the Windows port will no doubt cover costs, plus meet strategic needs, iPhone/Safari compatibility. Safari compatibility alone wasn't worth doing it apparently, they prefered to sell some Macs to any shop that cared about 5% of the market (i.e. revenue from Mac Users > cost of a Mac + time to test, a couple of grand in time and equipment, so any site with more than 100k/year in gross margins), but the iPhone gives them a reason to give up a few "testing Mac sales" to get more iPhone penetration
Come October, Mac OS X will serve everyone with one price, one version, one install: one vision of simple 64-bit desktop goodness.
one faith, one land, one volk, one fuhrer!! zeig heil!
I was thinking "and one ring to bind them"
Without RTFA, I can already tell you I prefer Safari, and this it why.
Two things:
1. Font smoothing/anti-aliasing. Typefaces just look better! Maybe this has been fixed in Vista, and I know IE7 does it to some extent (I don't know), but for us still on XP, this one simple thing is enough to make me switch.
2. Pretty image scaling. Also a small thing, but scaled images just look better! Why is this so damn hard for other browsers to do?
Disclaimer: I am a long-time mac user, and a UI designer, so these things probably matter more to me than they do to the average engineering bear.
If the OS X style anti-aliasing is what is used on the iPhone, then it makes perfect sense.
As some others have already pointed out, the entire point of Safari for Windows is iPhone development, not necessarily winning over converts.
{ - Generic Guy - }
It's somewhat useful from a frontend web development perspective in that I don't have to KVM over to my Mac to see exactly what fonts will look like in OS X.
But I agree that for the average user ignoring his/her personal settings is not good for usability.
I made a comment about this to my wife the other day, after I tried out the Safari beta. She's a long-time Mac user, and remembers dealing with versions of all kinds of programs that had been ported -- just barely -- from Windows. She agreed it was, at the very least, ironic that Apple's software on Windows continually perpetrates the exact same violation of UI conventions that its users complain about when apps are ported the other way... but wondered it Apple might simply figure that turnabout is fair play.
I think Dvorak was right, although maybe not for the correct reasons or based on solid evidence. That changed yesterday.
Comments that talk about how Safari on Windows is a quality product meant to drive the halo effect or that Apple is hypocritical for pushing their own design standards on Windows completely miss the point. Safari on Windows is not about the browser, it is for driving and course-correcting efforts to bring the Apple development platform to Windows. Why? So they can adopt it if necessary.
Some background first. The recent D5 hosted Jobs-Gates interview had both participants talking about ongoing partnership. Jobs stated repeatedly that Apple is a software company and he described how the software in the user space (e.g., iLife, iWork, Finder) is what people are buying into on the Mac. Value delivered by Apple comes in the form of good design and polish sense, not what kernel their software runs on.
When you look at iTunes and Safari on Windows, what do you see? Apple (not native Windows) font rendering, Core Animation effects (Cover Flow), compositing effects (inline find with Safari 3). There is a lot of infrastructure coming over to Windows from Mac OS X to support these products. (I believe such an assumption is valid because the smartest way to develop cross-platform applications is to minimize differences in the code base, keeping impedance matching in abstraction layers.) Now that Vista is a technical match (and goes beyond in some cases) for OS X with features Apple cares about (e.g., WPF), how long will it be until Apple can deliver a complete platform on both operating systems? As they do this, they increasingly marginalize the significance of what you find under the hood. No mainstream user is going to care if Finder runs on a FreeBSD or NT derivative.
As Microsoft has already done a lot of work bringing Vista on-par with OS X, it makes little sense for Apple to continue investing money in duplicating the effort. Their sobering strategy may be to focus on dealing directly with users and leave the operating system drudgery to another company with resources to burn. If they continue on this path, the remaining technical barriers will be gone. For a long time, it was processor architecture. Now they are chipping away library and framework barriers by introducing what amounts to a Macintosh application runtime environment on Windows. Given enough time and real-world experience porting their frameworks, it could eventually come down to another check-box option for universal binaries.
When they reach that point, Mac OS XI could very easily be NT under the covers.
Why bother.
The thing should not replace Firefox or the IE, it is just a test kit for the cancer of cell phones the iphone. Since apple espressively disallows any local development of applications for the mac, the users have to design... Now swallow a little bit, ajaxed webapps to get the functionality they need, no applets, no local phone java, no objective c or any other language nothing. (Well applets maybe, but nothing hints into that direction for now, which is a bummer but Apple still has no final jdk6 so go figure) So now we have to write that dreck for business purposes (webapps are the worst way to write a decent ui and generally application) we now also have to use that dreck to write apps for a phone. To the worst, his Highness Stevie the first said this is a very modern way to write applications. I just say, this is the way you write applications like in the mid 70s now enforced on the next technological platform where it should not appear! Dont get me wrong, I am a committer myself to one of those numerous thousands of webapp frameworks. But that does not make my opinion of writing webapps as the worst way of having to write an application any better!
Why? What's the real value of it in this vs./versus issue? Do you have a better argument than "The New York Times does it this way," or "the small minority of uninfluential people who have the same pet peeves as I do will use it as the excuse to justify the preconceived bad opinion of you"? Or are you just another random intellectually bankrupt pet peever who's never even taken Linguistics 101, pretending that he knows something about language?
I mean, there are editorial tasks the Slashdot editors don't do today that are actually important, like, well, reading the stories linked from the submissions to determine whether the submitters' descriptions of them are even remotely accurate. If you were
Are you adequate?
Based on all the server logs I look at, just about everyone is someone new to Safari.
Sleep is for the Weak
Apple, Why not drop the current donkey-doody code that comprises Safari and make it a branded derivative of Mozilla, a la Netscape? Safari in its current incarnation is broken beyond repair.
Because they focus on elegant interfaces that don't spam you with junk you rarely click.
"Sufferin' succotash."
But the frogurt is cursed!
By announcing a shift to Windows first, you've forced Jobs to stay on OS X. Way to go!
Gotta love how they ignore DPI settings etc. I can't even see the menu on my 1400x1050 laptop because it's some special hardcoded gui. Oh and I'll keep harping on the lack of middle-click autoscrolling and middle click to close tabs until Apple gets its butt in gear and fixes these omissions.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Opera still kicks all three of these browsers to the curb. Infact, running the exact same seven sites on my computer, Opera was using 90MB of RAM and 0% CPU while Safari was using 10-25% CPU and 78MB of RAM. Opera, however, has a slew more features than Safari for that 12MB of RAM.
Stop using those other crap browsers and get with the Intenet already! Opera is awesome!
Apple made a conscious choice to not use Gecko as the basis of Safari. IIRC they based the decision on size and code simplicity. They felt KHTML was a cleaner core to use than gecko.
--
What is pirate software? Software for inventory of stolen treasure?
I feel the same way with every new version of Office.
Safari has to include OS X's font rendering and UI because it's what will be used on the iPhone. Safari for Windows is a development platform for iPhone web apps, developers will need Safari to look and feel exactly as it will on the OS X version of Safari that's running on the phone.
As for the look of the fonts, Apple's rendering attempts to portray the font as accurately as possible, which is important for their desktop publishing audience. You're used to what Windows does, which packs every line into the pixel grid so that it's thin and inaccurate. When you see what Times New Roman is actually supposed to look like on a screen, you think it's "blurry" because you've been staring at the 1-pixel wide, hackish typography of Microsoft's rendering for so many years.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Apple should know better. They crow about usability guidelines for years and years and then takes a bit dump all over Windows conventions whenever they port some of their software. There is no acceptable rationale for doing this. Hopefully in this case it is just because its an early beta and they intend to switch over to the Windows uxtheme engine at some point. If not, I predict their browser share will be lucky to move beyond 1%.
It isn't even as if Safari is a particularly outstanding browser. It works and has some nice features but it doesn't hold a candle to Firefox. Or Opera. Or even IE7. Toss in some weird ass UI and I don't see anybody adopting it even if Apple start bundling it with iTunes. If they fix the UI they might win some converts, but the only people I see ever wanting to use it would be Apple users who might be attracted if iTunes synced their bookmarks to their iPod or similar.
The frogurt is also made of rotten Apples.
Hey, most SUVs wouldn't be so bloody if the drivers could actually see the road in front of their vehicles.
Mac users are in love with Apple so they will go back to using Safari even if they find something better.
Yes, this is quite insightful. Mac users do in fact love Apple. They masturbate to visions of Aqualicious dancing Apple logos and photos of a boyish Steve Jobs hawking 128k Macs.
IE is dead on the Mac. Firefox is powerful and flexible, but not very Mac-like. Safari gets the job done for Mac users (shades of IE for Windows users?). Personally I prefer Camino, and there is much to recommend in OmniWeb. Even Shiira is becoming a contender. But most people aren't browser geeks. They use what is given to them. It works that way in the Windows world and it works that way in the Mac world.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Hence, Camino.
It is a really good compromise between the Mac behavior of Safari and the feature set of Firefox. It supports the websites that Safari hasn't worked with, and offers the look and feel and integration that FF can't.
That's bad.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
I've been using Safari on two Windows computers all day and ... well ... it works.
The screen redraw is a bit strange - sometimes elements just don't redraw, but otherwise it looks great for a beta.
I realllly don't understand the bitching about the type - Safari looks brilliant - much brighter, more refined. I've just fired up IE and the type just looks ... jaggie and nasty all round.
Windows UI conventions? There ARE Windows UI conventions?? ;-) Seriously, Safari needs some serious polishing, but I think it's a great (plain ol) browser for Windows.
Apple is looking for more territory within their control on Windows. Providing their closed binary only Web Browser allows them to have features and extensions that won't be affected by changes made in MSIE or Firefox. This makes creating new closed linkages to Apple products much, much easier.
We can expect to soon see "Safari only" web extensions that work with Apple products. iPhone is only the first.
Apple is trying to create a platform that only they control across Windows and Mac.
Watch and learn....
Facebook is billions of individual "Skinner Boxes." And if you use it you are the pigeon!
Safari uses its own custom font rendering, so doesn't integrate with Windows font settings, and all the dialogs and dialog controls look like OS X - seriously, try running Safari. It doesn't look like a Windows app at all. Buttons are luminous blue and curved, etc. Some dialogs slide out from underneath the title bar when they appear.
Precisely the kind of thing Mac users lambasted Microsoft for with Office 6, iirc.
Still, at least it maximises when you double-click the title bar, which is more than iTunes for Windows managed to do for a few releases. I could do without the Hitchhikeresque Black Text on Dark Grey Background thing though.
it comes with a ring........
This is the reason why whenever people ask me what cross platform toolkit they should use I say: none. Write a GUI for each platform you want to support and use a common backend.. that way you are more likely to write a GUI that is suitable for the platform.
Of course, when they insist, I suggest they use Qt. The problem isn't that it doesn't follow UI conventions - Windows users are used to that; every company and their mother design their own UI. The problem is that it brings its UI conventions outside to the window border/window decorations. Specifically:
- Can't resize by dragging window edge - This is the one the article mentioned, and it's the worst. No other Windows app I've used, not even the particularly egregious, suffer from this problem (excluding the ones that aren't meant to be resized at all).
- Doesn't understand how to maximize - In Windows, maximizing means more than resizing the window so the edges touch the screen edges. 1. It means the window can't be resized, so don't show any resize handles. 2. It means the window takes up the whole screen, excluding the taskbar. 3. It means the window is the only window on screen. Open and maximize Firefox, then open and maximize Safari. If you click on the top right corner of the screen, you would expect Safari to close. But not only does Safari not close, Firefox closes. (Trillian is the only other Windows app I've used that suffers from the same problem, and is the reason why I now set Firefox to confirm before closing.)
- Doesn't understand the taskbar - In Windows, when I click on a window's taskbar button, I expect it to minimize if it isn't already minimized. When I right-click on the taskbar button, I expect to be able to minimize, restore, and maximize, depending on which state it's in.
- Doesn't act like a window - If I press WLK+M, I expect all windows to minimize, not all windows except Safari. If I use the taskbar to cascade or tile windows, I expect every window to cascade or tile, not every window except Safari. In short, I expect Safari's window to behave like a window.
These are problems no other Windows application suffers from except Safari (with the exception of Trillian). Even the worst GTK apps suffer from is OK/Cancel button order switching.Want a high quality FOSS RTS game? Try Warzone 2100!
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
Apparently Safari on Windows needs some bug fixing (Safari 3 on the Mac seems fine). Aside from that, how many features do you need to check your Hotmail and watch YouTube? Windows reviewers seem to have odd ideas of what the average Joe wants.
I used to keep Camino around to deal with websites Safari won't work with, but to be honest, I haven't run across such a site in a looong time. Besides, WebKit is faster and renders text better, and it also recognizes embedded color profiles in images. That it supports more of the CSS standard is a bonus, too. What site(s) are you finding that Safari has trouble with?
Make Slashdot readable! See journal.
I just opened the Ars article in a Firefox tab and the browser crashed and froze Windows.
Even though it may not be better than Firefox, which I've been happily using on my corporate laptop side by side my personal laptop with Safari, I am interested in having only one application for both platforms. It's just easy to have the same exact look and feel on two platforms for me. So perhaps for that 1% of all computer users that use both a Mac and a Windows box, this is going to be a good solution. Just my 2c.
I have installed the Safari for Windows Browser and my early opinion of it is positive. The pages do load faster than IE and many pages just plain look better...besides as much as I like both Firefox and IE, although Firefox is better, it's nice to have another alternative...aside from Opera that is...just not a fan...of course there is always CyberJack!!!http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberjack
Safari has a few moderate bugs but it also supports a lot of spiffy CSS3. Bugs: displays noscript element automatically if it's not associated with a JavaScript. It also has some box-model issues. It's about the same as Presto or Trident but not as good at rendering as Gecko. It has the most CSS3 support that I'm aware of versus Gecko, then Presto, then KHTML, then Trident. The GUI isn't developed enough...but then again all browsers currently ship with developers and programmers in mind: no the common person who needs a history button to find that page they looked at a week ago and have no clue how to find it. The trend of unusable minimalism needs to end.
- John
http://www.jabcreations.com/
Apple blashphemy! Destroy them!!!!!!!
I'm just curious. Myspace.com seems to be a wonderful stress-tester for web browsers, I realized.
For the last 3 months or so, surfing myspace.com has been near unusuable. It struggles to load images. Wondering if it was something on the backend of myspace, I tried in IE. Ie loaded up profile pictures & such lightning fast.
So, how does Safari work on myspace.com? Either bloated profiles, or just regular pages(browse, forums, groups, etc).
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
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Agree with the parent post. The review can be summed up as "its not Firefox".
As far as Safari ignoring Windows conventions... *shrug*. The shoe is on the other foot? Word 6 for Mac was the same: Windows conventions on a Mac, in the interest of "portability" or "consistent user interface". Everyone hated it. The difference here being, I wouldn't expect anyone to be surprised by this, since iTunes does the same thing (Mac L&F in Windows) and has been around for quite awhile. Maybe the reviewer has been living under a rock, and hasn't seen iTunes?
Last, from the article: "it still won't be as powerful or feature-loaded as Opera or Firefox." Again, the statement "it's not Firefox" applies. In this case though, with all due respect, the author has missed the point. That is one of Safari's advantages: it isn't bloatware (yet). I cringe every time I need to use Firefox (thankfully rare) because it is so painfully slow, especially to launch (its slower overall, but launch is especially painful).
Personally I am very excited about seeing Safari ported to Windows, and look forward to trying it out once it goes GA. Who knows, it might even gain enough of a foothold that webdev's start testing with it, which will benefit both Safari and Konqueror (since Safari's render engine is based on KHTML, iirc that's what Konqueror uses also).
I just finished reinstalling the one windows pc in our office, and added Safari.
It could easily import my bookmarks from my mac though a shared drive, and has been working well all day. Surfing Slasdot and half a dozen other sites. By no means that's a full test, but to me it seems absolutely fine - and FAST.
It will be my browser by choice on windows untill we get another MacBook. We were holding out for Leopard but it's not worth it till October. After having gotten used to Mac I just cannot stand windows anymore. Even installed Vista (clean install) to see if things would improve but it managed to slow an AMD Athlon 64 3200 with 1GB Ram and a 7200HD to a crawl. How on earth do they (MS) manage that. Absolutetly unusable. I am ready to chuck our MS Windows and Office licences in the bin! And buy Office 2008 if it's any good. Neoffice is doing fine, but can be a bit toooooo sloooowww. Whoever gets there first - making a usable intel OSX office suite - will get my money. Main contenters are Microsoft, Neoffice and OpenOffice. Here's hoping for OpenOffice......
The trouble Windows has been giving me on a (Compaq) branded PC is just incredible. 4 or 5 reinstalls in a year. And that's just running Microsoft office and Photoshop elements with Active Virus Shield from AOL/Kaspersky after Avast let me down. I HAVE HAD IT!!!!!!!!
Right now, in order of preference, my OS of choice for easy of use, compatability and low maintenance are:
- Apple Mac OsX (using it on two office MacBooks)
- Ubunto (have it running on a 1999 Dell Latitude in the living room)
- ?
- Windows XP (although Win2k was fine too. Using XP on the 3rd office PC for Office, Photoshop and AUtoroute
-?
-?
-?
- Windows Vista ( Just forget it, OK?)
Just my 2*2p.
KeyChain. Firefox uses its own password manager and not keychain making it annoying an yet another non standard place to store passwords and data.
I don't know what you were talking about with Safari 2 vs FireFox 1.5 Aside from plugins, FireFox was slow to load, slow to render looked different. Safari 2 vs FireFox 2 the bar moved entirely toward FireFox with its plugins, just as fast loading the application, just as fast loading pages, but still no Keychain.
Safari on Windows has been hit or miss with our in house testing, but it is behaving like a lot of newly released applications. Crashes hard and often on some machines, works flawlessly on other machines of the same OS Base (Win XP SP2) Safari 3 Beta for Mac is MUCH faster than FireFox and has all sorts of little things that made FireFox more useable (search while I type) are now in Safari.
On the Windows side, it is just a grab to increase the user base of a browser that runs for Mac Users and iPhone users. If it becomes 20% of the total browser space, it can't be ignored like it is now (even though it is rather standards compliant)
Disclamer: I use Safari for surfing and Firefox for debugging.
Yes - and why did they put the close button on the wrong side of the window???
There's not even a "window menu" that closes the thing upon a double click!
-----
-Ditching the old windows computer-
They missed the point. Apple's purpose of having Safari on Windows is NOT to give Windows users a taste of Mac OS. Not at all. The purpose is so that the stuff that runs on the iPhone will also run on the Windows desktop.
Very soon people will start buying iPhones and very soon after they will start runing iPhone applications on their phones. Then some one would ant to run that same app on their desktop. Tey will need safari to do that.
In theory they could run the iPhone app on IE or FF but I doubt many iPhone apps will be tested on any browser but Safari.
I think what Aple SOULD have done wil dump safri and ship all Macs and iPhones with Fire fox. I don't know what safri does the FF can't.
Just installed it and it crashed 3/3 tries upon startup, I give up.
Indeed. It's absolutely clear that Apple are wrong to focus on the 80 side of the 80/20 rule, as we can see from the utter market failure of the iPod
If you think the iPod was successful besides anything but marketing, you are mind-f**king yourself.
Pick up a Creative Zen Vision M, cheaper, more colors, more features, supports all audio/video formats so you dont' have to convert everything you drop on it, etc.
The Zen hits the 80/20 rule better than the iPod, as the Zen doesn't force iTunes down your throat, nor does it make you wait 20mintues to copy over a few song files because Apple insists on not support WMA or other formats that your music may already be stored in. Even a Divx movie takes no conversion on the Zen.
iPod = Marketing/Cool
This is not a receipe for LONG TERM success, Palms used to be cool as well until market saturation for the 'features' provided peaked.
If Apple thinks they are going to shove Safari at users that alreayd have a Corvette and tell them that the Miata they are offering is better because it has a Apple logo on it, they are NOT going to win the PC market place.
This is NOT consumer electronics where the average buyers are cattle. (And sadly Apple continues to do this even with their own computing hardware, want a fast Video Card, Cad/Gaming level laptop, then you sadly CAN'T buy a MAC.
I am actually NOT a Apple or Mac hater, I would rather they listen to engineers like myself and STOP FORCING crap on users because they know their marketing or fanbase with LET THEM GET AWAY WITH IT. I want the Apple that did provide the best Graphics, OS, Hardware, Products, not the lackluster 'good enough' crap of today.
In spite of his obvious and heavy bias towards Gecko, he chose KHTML. That should tell you something about the quality of the Gecko codebase.
What it tells me is that KHTML was better suited to the task. Without knowing more about programming for OSX, I can't tell you more than that other than both Gecko and KHTML could have done the job.
Konqueror has spoiled me. KIOslaves rock. Nothing comes close to it in terms of a unified desktop experience.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"Does it come with a brown shirt?"
No, but it does come with a black turtleneck.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Companies that listen to engineers sell to engineers, and that market just isn't big enough. Hardcore gamers, living in their mothers' basements demanding this week's exotic graphic cards? Not a market. People (or should that be `the person') who wants to play Ogg Vorbis? Who cares. The trick is producing products which most people want to buy, and then making them attractive to the remainder only is (a) it doesn't cost much and (b) it doesn't put off the mass market.
There's a vein in UK football management which would have you believe that actually winning matches isn't important, so long as various spurious proxies (possession, workrate, committment) are positive. Similarly products: it doesn't matter if it failed though bad design, bad manufacturing, bad support, bad pricing or bad hair: it failed. If the Creative Zen, whatever that might be, wasn't marketed as well as the iPod, that merely proves that Creative don't want to stay in business sufficiently much to do their jobs. Apple were completely fucked in the marketplace and had very little credibility when the (Mac-only) iPod launched, and yet they built a successful product. If it's so easy that you can sneer at it, why didn't Creative do the same?
I'm not for a second interested in doing marketing myself. But I'm not stupid enough to dismiss it as `just' marketing. There were any number of MP3 players five years ago. Only the iPod won out. That differentiation is the difference between success and being on life support (as Creative appear to be these days).
Anyone seen Rio around lately?
Of course some people prefer cars like the first generation Dodge Viper, which had almost no features, not even power windows or a credible radio option. It was fast 0-60, but 0-100 the Corvette was actually faster because of the technology GM used.
;)
A lie.
Well I owned both, did the whole Indy flight for ordering one of the first Vipers, etc.
Go look up AERODYNAMICS, and how the lack of aerodynamic design gave the performance edge to the Corvette and especially the ZR1 Corvette in comparison to the Viper. Also notice that Dodge revamped the Aerodynamic design of the Viper because of this embarassment.
GMail with chat. I'm kinda hooked on that, and even the Safari 3 beta doesn't support that. (Though that is probably Google's doing.) Also, I much prefer the fine-grained control over cookies that Camino provides. If it weren't for those things, I'd probably be using Safari too.
Have you taken a good look at their mouse design up till the last few years? ;) I'm not even sure they bothered changing in recent years but I know I managed to plug in my 5 button mouse on a G4 server I was forced to administrate a few months ago, and the mouse worked to some degree at least
Actually this is a thought that still goes through my head.
Apple basically told their entire customer base that the users were TOO STUPID to use a mouse with more than one button, and every Mac Fanboi rushed out to agree with Apple, not even realizing that they were arguing how stupid they were in agreement with Apple.
The religion Apple generates is almost scary sometimes. I do give them Marks for having a brilliant marketing department, it is up there with Jim Jones. However, I'm scared that they will release iKoolAid...
Ah, yes, I concede the point—I'd forgotten about Gmail's integrated Google Chat. Me, I just use iChat with Google's Jabber gateway.
Make Slashdot readable! See journal.
I installed Safari on Windows just to see what the buzz was about. It installed quickly and cleanly, or so I thought. Some browsing around my favorite sites to put some stress on it and found it to be much faster than IE 7, or Firefox 2.x. However, within an hour I discovered that the installation of Safari had broken my DivX 6.5 player. The DivX Pro converter continued to function, but the player aborted on launch with an error saying it was improperly installed and that a reinstall was require. Well, after a couple of reinstalls, an upgrade to 6.6, and a few reboots, I did some research into what was installed by Safari. When I hit the integrated support for the DivX format I knew I had found the smoking gun. An immediate uninstall of Safari restored full functionality of the DivX player immediately!
***** You have been warned. *****
Every change is not progress, but there is no progress without change.
By "flexibility" do you mean added bloat-ware?
Sure, it has some bugs, but it renders text better than IE or FF for me, at least. The only thing that would be nice is an ad-blocking widget and it'd be my default browser, however, I suspect that with some due diligence I could create a HOSTS file to do the job for me.
-Kinsey
When I got my Macbook I found some of the OSX apps deficient.
I ditched and replaced the following apps:
Safari --> replaced with Mac version of Firefox.
Terminal Emulator --> replaced with iTerm -- tabbed shell terminals and various niceties.
Writer (or whatever it was called) --> replaced with Emacs for development and NeoOffice for writing+ (spreadsheets, basic DB,
Sticky Notes --> replaced with 'Stick-Em-Up!' more full featured sticky notes - allows categorization of notes.
Finder --> replaced with QuickSilver.
I did keep the following apps - which I think work best from my perspective:
iTunes, Garage Band, iDVD, iMovie HD, iPhoto, Address Book, iCal, Dictionary, and the Unix development tools from the add-on CD.
Finally, I added a few other things that I wanted:
Python 2.5.1 (upgraded default python - which was way out of date), iGTD (project management), MiNews (news aggregator), CyberDuck (FTP/SFTP client - equivalent to WSFTP on Windows), TeamSpeex (TeamSpeak compatible client), and Text Wrangler (a text editor that can manipulate and read various text types - e.g. UTF8, and highlight code for a plethora of languages)
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
I agree there is something to be said of the surrounding product support.
However at what point do you realize that this is based upon false reasoning by the supporting companies?
I tend to question authority a bit too much, and just because Apple says jump and other companies are stupid enough to jump, doesn't mean you really need to jump.
There are a lot of products that are far beyond the iPod,iPhone and work well for the majority of people. For example you talk about your iPod integration to your steering wheel. You do realize there are bluetooth devices that offer features like this without the proprietary iPod requirements.
There are also devices that work well by voice command, one of which I have and I don't have to even click a button in my car, but just say "Volume Up" "Next Track" etc. Also why even go through the trouble of docking your iPod in your car? Buy a car like the 2007 Dodge Avenger that has all the features of the iPod built in, syncs automatically to your Music Collection and you don't have to even pull your iPod out of your pocket. These are features and synergy BEYOND iPod thinking.
People tend to let themselves be consumed into a product's enviroment, and that is where trouble happens as they no longer can see products or features outside of the iPod world. And there are products and technologies and things that are easier and work better for a lot of people.
As long as Apple owns your mindset so that you think, how this works with my iPod, you will start to lose your ability to accurately look at other technology that might serve you better than an iPod or supporting technology you have married it to.
I don't disagree, I just don't think it is a good thing.
With a minor background in psychology and the Jim Jones aspect to the iPod I see it as a bit disturbing. I remember people being interviewed about the end of the world in 1990 (no, not Jim Jones), and they were so convinced that the world was going to end they sold all their possessions, and then asked about what happens if the world doesn't end, their response was, "It has to end, I sold all my stuff."
We need to pull back and keep facts about the technology relevant and not the 'love' we have for the products. These are not people or ideals to form emotional bonds with, yet it is very common to see 1000s of people on the anti-establishment SlashDot even fall into this trap when it comes to iXXXX thinking.
Take care.
Because they focus on elegant interfaces that don't spam you with junk you rarely click.
That is a great thing, but you are implying that all other companies don't also consider UI 'overload'. MS was slapped around in the press this year for ripping out the concept of Menus in Vista/IE7 and even Office 2007 because they are dated ideas that are 'overload' and confusing by the junk that populated them.
So can I assume you think MS's UI designs are better than Apple then because Apple still hasn't given up a dated UI concept like a Menu Bar that Spams irrelevant information?
The problem with your logic is you assume Safari is easier to use because of the lack of features. When the UI of IE7 and even Firefox ARE MORE MINIMALIST, yet the products themselves offer more features for people that need them. There is a balance to this, and it would be different if IE7 or Firefox were cluttered with UI Junk, and they aren't.
I'm sorry, but I couldn't disagree more. I've been a Mac user since 1984 (yes, since there were Macs to use - used an Apple ][+ before that). I prefer Firefox to Safari. You see, the issue is that OS X broke so many of Apple's own human interface guidelines that "mac-like" means something completely different (and amorphous) today than it did back in the System 6 or 7 days or even OS 8/9. The side effect of which is that Firefox, while not conforming to typical Mac human interface guideline standards, is no more an offender than just about anything else on OS X. And while I like Safari, particularly its integration with the rest of the OS and Apple apps (like preview & address book), I find its idiosyncrasies to outweigh those advantages. Maybe Safari 3.0 will be better, but for now Firefox seems to be the best browser for me & the sites I visit.
And it's not only me - most of the hard core Macheads I know use Firefox over Safari. It is what it is - and as long as the interface keeps morphing does it really matter what browser I use. Apple will get the interface down one of these days and then there will once again be a standard to aim for.
The plus to it all is that I can also use Firefox on my Windows box and almost forget that I've switches OSes.
Wow, I can't believe it happened that quickly.
Obligatory link to Godwin's Law. Although it might not apply since the parent neither explicitly mentioned Hitler or Nazis.
He effected a bored affect.
Does it come with a brown shirt?
Nein, Mein Freund, Apple uses black shirts...
Blackshirts
Schutzstaffel
Then again, I'm using Opera.
*Shrugs.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Sounds much like every Java app. A lot of GTK+ apps. On Mac: every app not written by Apple or Adobe (all 3 of them).
And it's bad that they do it, too.
Note that Java has moved on a bit since the early days, and these days they can look and feel like native applications.
No, really. Do your part. :-)
Outlook doesn't minimize when you click on its taskbar button, and doesn't minimize when you press Win+M.
Office was always like that, though. For some reason Microsoft wants the current version of office to look like the next version of Windows, even if your version of Windows is ancient (for example, Office 97 in Windows 95 looked like Windows 98). All the UI widgets are custom and don't quite act how they're supposed to.
Hands in my pocket
Didn't we have these same articles yesterday? (-1, Redundant -1, Redundant -1, Redundant)
Safari is still in beta (-1 Redundant)
The window can only be resized from one corner (-1 Redundant)
Cocoa toolkit blah blah, probably as terrible as QuickTime Player, paging like crazy in RAM (-1 Redundant)
I read the Ars review and found it unusally poor, mostly subjective, and full of hyperbole. My response.
I've loaded the Safari 3 Beta on 3 different XP boxes and it did not, crash or refuse to install on any of them. That's right they all worked fine. Although Firefox did crash while I was downloading it (with only Slashdot open in tabs). I don't know about the ClearType issue, but I have 20/20 vision and the text and menus in Safari look fine to me. As for the Status Bar not being visible, I don't know what's wrong with your monitor, but it looks plenty fine to me.
Slashdot = -1 Redundant, Asperger, kdawson FUD, Libertarian, and Linux
I installed Safari on XP under Parallels and compared it in coherence mode to the native Mac OS version. From a rendering perspective, right down to the font rendering and subpixel antialiasing, they are utterly identical.
Years ago, someone made the joke of using the name "entbloess" (which is german) for a program mimicking exposé (which is french:) it is now called Reflex Vision and sits as standard on my windows machine and those of my mac friends who have to use win at work.
Reflex Vision is cheap and relatively functional given the limitations of windows. As for dashboard, it was originally known as "konfabulator" and seemingly copied by apple, after which yahoo bought konfabulator renaming it yahoo widgets.
On my mac i had to turn all widgets off conserve memory, but that was due to the shops misinformation that osx Tiger would work on 512mb ram, now seeing some of the nice effects of Enlightenment coming to osx Leopard i will consider getting a mac mini again, they are so cute:)
You must have confused Apple with Ubuntu...
or Zune, perhaps?
Does that make Opera, at version 9.2 the best then?
Emerald Astrology
Epiphany.
http://www.gnome.org/projects/epiphany/
Slashdotters love an analogy but here's my perspective from my experience.
Safari is faster, it's like going to the supermarket, grabbing stuff off the shelf from the grocery list not caring what brand you buy, if you forget anything, or how it's organised in your cart. Watermelon on top of your potato chips and eggs?? Got meat dripping onto your girlfriend's box of tampons? Big deal! No wonder Safari is faster!
IE and Firefox care a lot more, albeit they both do things differently. Everything is placed nicely in the cart, cleaning chemicals kept away from the food, fragile items kept on top while heavier items are down the bottom, you choose the brands you want/don't mind. This take a bit more time, but not much more.
"I just can't sit while people are saying nonsense in a meeting without saying it's nonsense" J Watson, Sci Am 288:(4)51
It doesn't have to be a killer app. It's just another option, and I think it's fairly obvious that it's to assist people who want to develop applications that are likely to work on the iPhone.
Further evidence indicates it may have come to the point where so much of Safari was already included in iTMS support in iTunes that they "may as well" release the whole browser, and see how people react.
I find it endlessly amusing how Slashdot is repeatedly posting Apple bashing articles since WWDC. It looks like Jobs spit on taco's car or something. There has to be some kind of grudge here. And as for the rest of you, why do you complain about a free product like this? Are you Apple investors or something?
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
no, no, no,
Only the elitist fanboys will receive black turtle-necks, the rest of them will receive brown turtle-necks.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
There's no Sieg Heil in One Vision
BTW zeig means show, thus zeig heil sounds like a religious message, because it means "show salvation".
After IE7, nobody should ever respect any UI guidelines. The fact that in IE7, the menu is below the URL text box, is one of the most frustrating UI abominations ever.
I for one am keeping iTunes on my mac only for buying songs, otherwise I use Floola on both the mac and office PC, with the same iPod.
Floola GUI is compact, simple, and quite feature-packed though, and most of all it doesn't lock your iPod on a single machine.
You can also listen complete tunes from the ipod through the PC or mac loudspeakers.
http://www.floola.com/modules/wiwimod/
Herve S.
Outlook 2003 certainly does minimise when you click on teh taskbar button, i can't speak for other versions however. It also minimises with win+M. unless you are talking about older versions, or possibly 2007 which is a bit of a law unto itself.
Working for the (other) man
at least it looks, from the couple of maps I visited (I'm not used to Weather Channel being european)
Herve S.
Everyone missed the point entirely. Or maybe the real
intentions for releasing a version of SAFARI for Windows
wasn't disceminated fully to the crowd.
I had a meeting with Apple Canada yesterday and they
reinforced that the release of SAFARI for Windows was
simply the next step prior to the release of the APPLE
IPHONE.
The IPHONE will be open for 3rd party applications, which
will be interfaced through WEB2.0 standards via the
SAFARI browser.
If you think Apple released their browser to compete with
IE, or Opera, or Firefox, then you are still in the dark; swinging
at ghosts.
Get the whole story first before starting another browser holy
war on an open forum.
on OSXhints:t /~3/124520516/article.php
http://feeds.macosxhints.com/~r/macosxhints/recen
Herve S.
On Windows Vista, Outlook 2007 behaves as a regular window, moreso even than most other Office 2007 apps, which are fairly well-behaved for Microsoft products. Even Windows Live Messenger, which has a really stupid custom interface, manages to follow all the UI conventions I mentioned in my post.
Want a high quality FOSS RTS game? Try Warzone 2100!
Outlook doesn't minimize when you click on its taskbar button, and doesn't minimize when you press Win+M.
erm.mine does?
CheShA: Manchester Breakcore / Drill and Bass Yes I'm a s
Except that you CAN resize windows in iTunes from any side.....
Ummm - not only was this mentioned earlier, but every review of the browser has said this. It's common sense. Thanks for repeating everyone else, though.
That has to be the funniest line in the whole thing. Apple, by any imaginable explanation, is dead last with "multi-platform support", especially if you're considering 64 bit to be multi-platform. For one, you only talk about PPC, x86, x64 and SPARC. Linux and *BSD run on literally dozens more architectures and have for many years (decades?). Windows went 64 bit years ago as well. Only in the past 1.5 years can you even remotely consider apple to be multi-platform.
Now I'm not sure if your argument is multi-platform support or fewest disks to install. Either way, apple is still the last one to the table. Vista's 6 versions, depending on which of the numerous methods you acquire the disk from (MSDN, open licensing, OEM, retail, etc.) can all be installed from a single disk with the version being chosen upon installation and verified by the key that's entered. For IT shops, it's easy to acquire a disk that contains all 12 versions of Vista (6 versions on both 32 and 64 bit) on one DVD, again with the key verifying which was installed. This is also possible with Windows XP; you can install Home or Professional edition, OEM or Retail versions from the same disk and have been able to since '01 or '02. Also on Ubuntu, the alternate install CD installs all of the following: x86, x64, SPARC, PPC, Sony PS3. So now both your multi-platform support and fewest disks arguments are destroyed. Now let's move on...
Because for Windows and Linux, it's been not needed thus far. Again, see above - Windows and Linux have been using 64 bit processors for over 4 years now. People who choose to run 64 bit apps don't have any need to run them on old busted 32 bit machines - every PC that can be considered even remotely current has a 64 bit processor. That's not true with apple, being so late to join the party, so they have to provide some way to support their previous architecture.
OK, now you've singled out Ubuntu. That's pretty much how Linux works, you install what you need when you need it. You're trying to praise apple for pre-loading a possibly unneeded 32 bit compatibility layer. The 32-bit compatibility layer in Linux is easy enough to install. In many distributions it can be installed during initial system installation. On other 64 bit distributions it's included by default (same as apple). And of course Windows does, and has been doing for years, exactly what apple is going to do, maybe, 5 months from now. Good job.
So, what you're saying is that apple offers very little choice in one's ability to buy what they need and customize a system. <car-analogy>Buying a mac is like buying a Ford but you can only pick between a Ford car and a F
Thanks Apple, for bringing us another fine ambassador to join the ranks of Quicktime in signing up new users to wave the Apple flag.
.mov files... typical Apple lock-in, they're as bad as Microsoft with those proprietary formats.
Because Quicktime is surely the best media player for Windows, thus Safari... ohh I can't keep a straight face. Quicktime is one of the worst media players ever to blight the face of Windows. It's bloated, intrusive, quirky, and not even fully functional unless you pay extra money for things like full screen view. People only use it because it's the most obvious way to watch
Sure, people are all saying that Safari on Windows is just an SDK, but seriously, is this the best Apple has to offer in terms of interoperability? Steve Jobs is adamant that Apple is a software company first and foremost. So why in heck do they keep publishing such software gems as Quicktime and Safari as ambassadors to the wider Windows community?
Open source software is making huge inroads into the general populace with great products like Firefox that work in Windows and show everyone just how great FOSS is without making people go through the pain of installing Linux. You'd think Apple could learn a thing or to from this approach.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
As a Mac user forced to suffer PCs at work, I have to say Safari on doze isn't going to take off until there's a drag-drop install. The PCs at my workplace are install-locked. If you're not an administrator, you can't install... unless you get the mobile version of Firefox or copy the Firefox folder from a PC with it installed (which is how I come to be using FF to make this post.) Safari needs to be drag-droppable before Windows users will adopt it in any numbers. As long as it's strict Macroslop "only-install-from-the-installer" people are not going to try it at work, and that's how it could make inroads into most people's lives. Apple have dropped the ball on this one.
"I hope you like Guinness, Sir. I find it a refreshing substitute for, er... food." Col. Jack O'Neil, SG-1