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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.
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.
one faith, one land, one volk, one fuhrer!! zeig heil!
Does it come with a brown shirt?
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.
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
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
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.
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
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!
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.
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 - }
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!