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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.
Since when are Safari's ever "bug free"?!?
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
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!
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.
Firefox and Opera are both available on Windows, yet most people use IE. This doesn't mean that IE is better, just that it's already there, and good enough for most people. They probably "don't have any use for any of the extra features in Opera or Firefox extensions".
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.
So is your objection to IE the fact that it's bundled with Windows, making it the default browser over FF or Opera, or that it's bug-filled? And if it is the former, but it is different because "Microsoft is a monopoly," how is Apple using a similar position to become the dominant OS X browser morally or ethically (not legally) different?
Disclaimer: I think that bundling both Safari and IE was a breach of some kind of ethos best described as componentization.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
...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?
Let's not forget that it also has Apple's brand name on it.. and Mac users are in love with Apple so they will go back to using Safari even if they find something better.
How we know is more important than what we know.
...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.
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.
I'm a web developer and the "problem" with Safari is that it's so compliant with standards. I'm very careful to stick with (X)HTML standards as much as possible, so I have little trouble supporting all browsers. Most developers are pretty lax when it comes to HTML since they are used to IE and Firefox not enforcing all of the rules that differentiate each version of the standards.
Developers: We can use your help.
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.
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.
I honestly must agree with this. People are starting to complain about the new bulk and bloat put into FireFox, and then other people turn around and complain about the simplicity in Safari...
I have both Firefox, and Camino available on my Mac, at the simple press of CMD+Space, then type "fire" or "cami" respectively. However, I still use Safari. Why? Because Safari does just about everything I need. Why do I have FF and Camino available? Well, one of my banks doesn't think that I should be able to use Safari with their webpage, so I keep FF around. Also, MSN Passport likes to store a "universal" cookie, and since I have two accounts, I keep two different browsers open to keep them open. Same issue with Google Mail, if I turn on the "remember me" button, then it's quite hard to get two different windows to be setup for different gmail accounts.
Basically, I keep FF and Camino around just to have another browser as a fall back. Safari does what I need... it surfs the net. I don't need a text editor with a web-browser, and I don't need a web-browser with all the features of FF.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
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
Everyone in my office is on Macs and even the biggest Apple fanboy here uses Firefox. I prefer Safari because of its speed and lower memory usage. But I prefer Firefox for the plugins.
Mac users like myself don't pick Safari because it's made by Apple. They use it because it comes preinstalled, integrates very well with the OS, and doesn't have enough significant issues to deter its use.
Developers: We can use your help.
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.
title != alt
>>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.
The only experience with Apple software I can think of at the moment is Quicktime. The word "elegant" does not come to mind.
Precisely. Everyone's howling how this can't possibly replace Firefox or IE. Well, guess what - it's not supposed to do that. What it's supposed to do is get the iPhone's web interface out to all those developers that are clamoring for an iPhone dev kit, because His Steveness announced that the way you get apps on the iPhone now is to make them AJAX friendly web pages. And since there's only going to be one web browser on the iPhone, you better be able to test functionality on it, regardless of where you're designing the app.
Also, how everyone mewling about how buggy and unfinished it is... HELLO! It's a first release BETA, of course it's unfinished!
Some people... jeez, if Apple released a handheld cure for cancer, they'd complain that it only came in a brushed metal case.
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
I don't have a use for all the extra bloat features that just slow the browser down. All I want is tabs and popup blocking. Safari has both, as well as fast page rendering and a low memory footprint (until one opens 30 tabs per 4 windows as I generally do.) For people like me, Safari is perfect. Firefox has got too bloated and slow, it's like Netscape 4 all over again.
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
Indeed. Nobody else seems to have grasped the irony of complaining that a browser is not as "powerful or feature-loaded as Firefox". Wasn't the original design goal of Firefox to be minimalist and fast? Any reviewer who thinks Firefox is great because of its power and feature set comes across as a bit of a noob.
FWIW, I use Firefox and Mozilla every day for web development, so I appreciate its power and feature set. However, I use Safari to Just Plain Browse, so then again I don't.
Bad arguement
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.
For a user who doesn't care about features IE7 (which is being pushed in the windows world) is a great browser (with minor tweaking) it opens web pages and is quite quick. Firefox is quite evilly installing itself on machines and it is great for power users (please note I feel Firefox is evil because of all the program installers which default its installation) then you have Opera which I hear does proper rendering.
Elegent software which has easy to find secuirty problems, huge differences in rendering, buggy as hell, I always though IE7 and Firefox were simple to use and their default setup makes them user friendly. I can't get this bera to even install, Apple made a huge fanfare about this product and I'm finding yet anouther reason not to switch.
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.
The entire review was focused on how Safari lacks usability compared to Firefox, from not being able to read the text on the screen to a terrible bookmark manager and beyond. Thats not elegant, simply, straightforward, or easy for the average user.
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. -
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...
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.
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!
My objections to IE are:
It's installed by default and not easy to remove (safari is easy to uninstall on OSX, and you can choose not to have it when you install the OS)
It's support for web standards is way behind other browsers, and this has resulted in a massive stagnation of the web.
It's a relatively simple and featureless browser in it's default state
The bundling doesnt bother me, so long as its possible to deselect it during install as well as remove it post-install. It should also be possible for third party distributors to remove it from their OEM installs and recovery media, and replace it with their own choice of browser (and yes, apple could do with having some third party distributors in the first place).
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
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.
Would probably be more funny if it was true. So what are some of these AJAX widgets that don't work in Mac browsers? ...And why do you need to "boot" QuickTime? ...And why would a Mac user need to run a non-Flash page when Macs come with Flash support already built-in?
Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.
But it comes with a free frogurt!
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.
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'
'Does anyone expect the submitter think Apple's plan is for Safari to become the dominant browser on Windows?'w ser_war_safari_firefox/
Um, the CEO of Apple...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/12/apple_bro
I'm amazed at how many people are protecting this current joke of a browser.
Its not just got less features, its not just different to firefox, its not just beta issues, its a mess. Even the simplist things don't render well in it, (Check the register for more info.) it crashes constantly, its got more security holes than unpatched IE, and it ignores all of the O/Ss GUI conventions. This is supposed to be a beta yet it can not accomplish things that were stable in Opera, IE and Firefox alpha versions.
There is very little to defend here, its _not_ just made for developers, it _is_ a pile of crap, and they need to do a _lot_ more than your normal beta work to make it a viable competitor.
Also contrary to what some posts are saying I am not particularly annoyed or dissapointed by this and I do hope it will improve considerably, its free and competition is good, it just isnt showing any signs of presenting any.
I have to disagree. KHTML is one of the better html rendering engines, though it has its quirks (but every html rendering engine does). Just because you don't like Konqueror, doesn't mean choosing KHTML was a bad choice.
It only takes one man to change the Wisdom of the Crowd to Tyranny of the Masses.
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.
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"
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 - }
Nowhere in the link you provided does it say Jobs expects Safari to be dominant. That is, after all, the point you were addressing when you posted it here.
As for the rest, Safari works very well on Mac - much better than Firefox in some areas, slightly worse in others. I expect it to improve on Windows as well.
The problem is the broken browsers early on which require modern browsers to operate the same way in the name of web site compatibility. Same reason Microsoft has to keep legacy cruft in their OS to support the broken programs from 1990.
This comment was randomly generated by a school of piranhas chewing on the PCB of a Microsoft Natural Keyboard.
Based on all the server logs I look at, just about everyone is someone new to Safari.
Sleep is for the Weak
Why do people obsess over memory usage? Unused memory is wasted memory. If I have 2GB of RAM, I want it filled to the brim with cache until something more important needs it.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Dave Hyatt.
"Sufferin' succotash."
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."
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.
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!
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/
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.
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.
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...
i use extensions, like adblockplus, filtersetg and a whole bunch of others.
is this what you are talking about?
Imagine extensions that can be installed into the OS once and then become available for every application installed on the system.
> I don't know what safri does the FF can't.
Pass the Acid2 test?
Join moola.com, play games to earn money.
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
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