Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Both firefox and opera are available to windows yet most people use internet explorer. See the parallel?
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
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?
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.
...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.
Safari is not based on Konqueror. Konqueror is a fairly generic application for running plugins. One plugin is KHTML, which is used for web browsing. WebKit, used by Safari, is based on KHTML.
Apple evaluated Gecko. They even hired Dave Hyatt to lead the Safari team. If you're not familiar with Dave's other work he:
- Worked at Netscape from 1997 to 2002,
- Created Chimera, which was later renamed Camino.
- Co-created Phoenix, which was later renamed Firefox.
- Wrote the first specifications for XBL and XUL
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.I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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
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.