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.'"

Comments

Re:Review summary: "It's not the same as FireFox"

[DogDude]

No, that's not what he said. He said that Safari ignores most Windows conventions. That's bad.

You are almost exactly wrong

[Space cowboy]

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

Re:Pshhh...

[Bob-taro]

It's been 3 minutes, I can't believe no one's corrected you yet ... It's EBCDIC.

Re:Review summary: "It's not the same as FireFox"

[Zarel]

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. 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.