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Safari for Windows Downloaded Over 1 Million Times
ClaraBow writes "Apple reports that it took Apple just two days to reach 1 million downloads of its newest Safari Web browser for Windows. If these downloads manifested into regular Safari users, then we just might have a third major browser on the Windows platform. If Safari can obtain a 10% market share on Windows, then it would further weaken IE's position and give standards-based browsers more leverage with developers."
These statistics make me wonder if Konqueror 4 will become another large competitor on Windows. Konqueror and Safari both share a very common core (KHTML/WebKit), so the renderring and page handling should be relatively the same. Web designers can get another speedy and a more native web browsers that tests their sites for the same purpose, and general users can get a lightweight, standards-compliant, open source web browser (without the OSS requirements, you can already get this with Opera, of course) that won't try to enforce another platform's "look'n'feel" like Apple's apps all do.
For the interested, you can grab an alpha copy of KDE 4 (download qt-copy, kdelibs, and kdebase at the very least; you can use either GCC/Cygwin or MS Visual Studio to compile it). On OS X, there are precompiled universal binaries for everything, and Kubuntu and openSUSE users can get packages for it from their respective websites.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
That's almost as many downloads as firefox got in its first 24 hrs.
A new browser - that will target a different userbase to FF & divide the market up a little more, will make the web a better place for everyone.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Congratulations to Slashdot and its 1 millionth Safari 3.0 story!
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
I might be way off, but it seems more likely to me that Safari will be grabbing its marketshare from firefox, not IE.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Seeing as many of those downloads will be from web developers and plain ol' interested folks wanting to see what all the fuss is about. If all those FireFox downloads were actual FireFox users, FireFox would be the most-used browser on the market, or at least have a larger-than-25%-or-whatever share. Downloads!=users, especially for software as buggy as Safari.
(And I'm not flaming anyone or anything here, just pointing out the fact that 1m of anything only equates to 1m of exactly that, and nothing else)
nobody gives a shit about you, your opinion, or your blog. please die in a fire.
I downloaded Safari when it was announced, and it's a really slick browser in windows. It's got a little quirks that are reminiscent of mac os x features that might be confusing to PC users, but honestly it's great being able to test safari, firefox, opera and IE all in windows now. It makes my job much easier as a web dev.
I'm really glad that apple released this, and I hope it does well at establishing a good sized customer base. Competition is _always_ good, even if it draws market share from firefox.
Safari is no competition for Internet Explorer, since noone who is able and willing to download and install another browser is still using IE. It's main competitor is Firefox, but I can't imagine many FF users switching to Safari as it confirms every prejudice I as a Windows user have about Mac software: it looks grey and it works against me (e.g. no ctrl-enter, can't resize it easily).
It's safe to assume that a certain percentage of windows users will never download a different browser b/c a) they don't know about alternative browsers b) IE is good enough c) don't care. How many of those users that don't fall into the above catagories downloaded firefox and then in the past couple of days downloaded Safari? Could sarfari be canabalizing FF users? Are we just seeing 'churn' here whereby people go from FF to safari and back again?
I highly doubt these 1million were users that have never used a third party browser.
Unfortunately, the type of computer user that would download and evaluate different web browsers are the type of users that have likely already switched to Firefox. So if these people stick with Safari then it will be mostly at the expense of Firefox.
The majority of people I know that use Firefox do so because I either told them to download it, or I downloaded and installed it for them. They will use whatever program gives them internet access that has a convenient shortcut on their desktop or quick launch menu, and as long as webpages and stuff appear when they click on things then that's what they will use until they replace their computer.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
If Safari can obtain a 10% market share on Windows, then it would further weaken IE's position and give standards-based browsers more leverage with developers.
That is, supposing it gets the 10% market share from IE, and not from Firefox, for example.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
The interest seem to have been pretty high, but I wonder if anyone there could use it for more than a straight full hour.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Good take on the font differences here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.htm l
Actually, the KDE guys (in particular, the ever awesome Zack Rusin) are working with the WebKit people in order to make WebKit work on the same rendering canvas that KDE uses (namely Qt's QPainterDevice). So Konqueror 4 will most likely use WebKit itself, rather than KHTML, on all three platforms, Linux, Windows and Mac.
... Just so long as WebKit doesn't end up deviating from the standards for whichever reason, anyway. Y'know. (Yeah, I've been in this industry too long to remain optimistic, I know.)
The reason why this is such great news is that this could possibly make WebKit, one of the most standard compliant engines out there, the number one option after IE (alongside with Gecko), which will hopefully prompt Web developers to, at last, respect the standards as the basics for any Web development.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
I'll also will be using it only very rarely.
Why? 1) I was curious, and 2) I thought that maybe I could use it for those very rare pages I visit that don't work well with Firefox, rather than use IE. Although, I have to have a very good reason to visit pages that don't work with Firefox -- usually I just boycott that site, probably forever...
Honestly, I probably would use Safari more, because it is faster, were it not for one simple fact:
No Flashblock. No Adblock. No Use.
Just that simple. You will have to pull these extensions from my cold dead mouse hand. (And yes, being also a Mac user I do know you can get add-ons for Safari, but they do not work well, not at all).
I have just downloaded it when I saw this story, but safari doesn't seems to work very well with slashdot or other more simples web page on my XP 64 box :(
See by yourself: Screen shot
I hate to admit it, but john Dvorak had an interesting theory[1]. Google pays the mozilla foundation $50 million/year or so for redirecting searches their way. I believe Google also had a deal with Opera (the latest version of Opera seems to default to yahoo, though). Is google paying Apple for Safari searches? If so, a windows port could bring in $10 million/year easily, enough to pay for the port and subsidize continued development.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Apple is being deliberately obtuse, their GUI doesn't fit, lots of interface works differently, and it renders some pages wrong. Stop building programs that are meant to train people into using your operating system- it's a stupid idea cos you just end up with a program that seems not to work properly. Whereas maybe if they went and built a really good program, and program that looks good and acts as you think it should, they may actually sell you the idea to change to their operating system as you give them confidence in Apple's ability to code good programs.
With this deliberate attempt to convert people to the church of Steve there's no way Safari will be a good contender, that's not what its built to be.
As a separate point, 1million downloads I'd bet quite a large chunk is the firefox users who want to just check it out (don't want to use it). They say it could take a chunk out of IE, no it wont because the people who were going to change did, they went to firefox cos its better. Safari isn't better, and its not hte only alternative, so IE cant lose the market share that doesn't use third party browsers, and wont loose the market share that doees, cos if they were going to move, they'd have gone to ff.
Nobody can know for sure, but many suspect that this isn't one million accountants and ebayers downloading Safari. It's more likely a combination of curious iPhone developers, eager Apple fanboys, and a bunch of your average browser-tier developers.
No story here.
The reason Safari for Windows might actually be a serious competitor on the browser market, is because Apple has something many others have not: Talented GUI oriented developers who can add that extra "spice" that will make ordinary people actually switch IE7 with something else.
...
Think about it. People with technical insight choose FF/Opera over IE because it offers them features that IE doesn't have. People without technical insight just don't care about these features - they don't use plug-ins, skins, or strange shortcut keys.
If I were to convince "regular non-technical users" like my mother, aunt, neighbour, etc. to switch to a non-IE browser, I would need something that appealed to them. Fancy plug-ins ad strange/smart hotkeys is not what they are looking for - they want a sleek, graphically appealing and (for them) intuitive user experience.
Apple is in the business of delivering that EXACT experience! Not too many fancy settings and details, just the sleek and appealing interface that common people understand.
If Apple play their cards right, they could be a serious challenge.
Personally I'll stick with FF (on all 3 platforms I use) but I can certainly understand why the less technical "common users" would fall for the "Apple experience". They are really good at adding that extra GUI spice
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...
When trying to use passwords Safari will crash.
Their site says the fastest browser but i really doubt that.
I downloaded Safari right away just because it was there. I ran it, thought, oh that's nice. Maybe good for testing browser compatibility some day. Then went back to Firefox. Same thing with everyone I know who downloaded it. Certainly Safari on windows will never be anyone's primary browser. But it will certainly find uses. Testing web pages, iphone development, and of course embedding the engine in iTunes (did it use IE up til now?). Jobs claimed Safari was the best web browser on all platforms. I call BS. Even almost all mac users I know use firefox or camino because they need features and capabilities that safari just doesn't have. As far as features go, Safari is at the very back of the pack (worst). Even IE 7 is much better in terms of extensions, core feature set. Safari for Windows is the Steve Jobs reality distortion field at its finest.
I do love how Safari for windows uses the nicer Cocoa font rendering. Really makes Windows' native font rendering look blocky and horrible. Does anyone know how to tweak freetype on linux to render the fonts closer to OS X? I already have hinting turned off and that helps, but the contrast of the fonts still isn't right (OS X fonts render a bit heavier, which I like on the screen).
I also personally don't mind the cocoa widgets either. Cocoa looks nice and is highly functional. That's all I care about. Although it definitely would look very out of place on Vista. But on XP, I think it's fine.
and in other news, 999,990 of those were mac users installing Safari on the Windows PCs they're forced to use as desktops as work. The other 10 people were simply bored, and slightly curious.
Yet another platform to test my CSS / javascript / DHTML / Ajax on...
Sigh...
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
It seems more likley to me, that a casual user who is just roaming along using IE today and blissfully unaware of Firefox would be more likley to stuble upon or otherwise install Safari - especially if it's installed as part of the iPhone setup, but even just normal Apple marketing may reach them. Firefx users might rty it but are less likley to switch since it offers less over what they already have.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Of course not all those million people are going to keep using it, but just like Firefox download counts it shows a certain level of interest that is impressive (in the case of Safari an impressive number for something that was only mentioned at a keynote at a developer confernce).
Who knows if Safai will stick with many people, but Apple did a good job of getting the word out it is there.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
As a web (among others) developer, having Safari on my machine is great. I'll never use it except for testing my sites to make sure they'll look and function the same on a Mac.
It'll save me from having to pester friends with Macs to send me screenshots of the website and trying to fix it. I now have access to all the major browsers on the same box.
Downloaded 3.0 and 3.0.1. Safari will never be used as my browser, but I'm glad it's available on Windows as a development tool.
You are used ot ineriour font rendering, and prefer things that way - it was good enouh for Grandpa dammit!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
the web app looks much worse with Firefox
There is one major difference, enthusiasts were interested in downloading FF1.0 because they wanted it for their primary browser whereas people are curious about Safari on Windows. You could forward an argument that the same initial million that downloaded FF1.0 are core technologists and wanted to take a peak at Safari. I am sure that many of the curious will continue to use Safari, but there is not the pent-up demand and anticipation for Safari that there was for FF. Now we will have to see how Apple translates this initial surge into a sustained user base.
-rd
The summary seems to automatically assume that the the people downloading and converting to safari are Internet Exploder users. It's more likely that they are alternative browser users like Firefox and Opera. The 75% that IE has left isn't likely to leave anytime soon simply because they either don't know that other browsers exist, what a browser is (the difference between IE and Outlook for example), or are too lazy to care.
"Gaol" posts? I thought you were misspelling something else, but then I realized "gaol" is an old spelling of "jail". Interesting.
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
There! I said it.
One million downloads of Safari for Windows? My bet is that these were mostly curious users and that after the initial torrent, Safari downloads will taper off.
My guess is that Safari for Windows will mature as a beta and than become a part of the iTunes download bundle. I remember back a handful of years ago when I refused to put Quicktime on my system because it seemed lame/apple-y-obtrusive on my pristine Win2k box. Fast forward a few years, I've got an iPod, and iTunes, and along comes Quicktime with every iTunes download/update.
If Apple does the same thing with Safari as they did with Quicktime (i.e bundle it with iTunes), we could see a really large installed user base for WinSafari. And all the delicious Google ad search revenue that comes with it.
obviously skewed statistics from a popular site I know of:
firefox: 61% .5%
IE: 20%
unknown: 7%
safari: 5%
mozilla: 3%
opera: 2%
konquorer:
netscape/galeon/camino: ~0%
And by OS:
Windows: 64%
Macintosh: 15%
Linux: 12%
Unknown: 8%
Solaris: 1%
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
My uncle is a transvestite you insensitive clod!
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
You do realize that the unified nature of Konqueror, for which you give it such high praise, would be present with IE had Microsoft not been accused of monopolistic practices for doing that sort of thing?
And referring to Windows as ugly while implying Linux isn't? At worst, XP was plain. Vista is quite nice looking. One of the big drawbacks of Linux is the frequently bulky/ugly interface. A lot of that is personal preference, but I daresay far more people would agree with me than with you.
You lose a few more points by lamely saying "windoze" as if that somehow lends force to your argument. Call it by its name, or look like the teenager you probably are.
I love my sig.
How long did it take the first version of Firefox to get to 1 million downloads as compared to Safari?
That may say something about how the general public feels about open source offerings v. closed source offerings outside of Microsoft. Note: I am not making any comparisons about the quality of Firefox v. Safari (I use both, I like both), so don't blast me off Slashdot...
I am just wondering what it says, if anything, about the general public's perspective.
Over a million downloads of Safari for Windows probably means a whole lot of disappointed people at this point. I personally have had nothing but trouble with Safari, textless menus and lockups. I finally gave up and uninstalled the thing. I know that betas are test versions, but honestly, Safari for Windows feels more like alpha class software right now. The general public should not be using this right now. I think they rushed this out in this bad condition because Steve Jobs wanted to talk about it and Safari as the host for 3rd party apps on the iPhone. It's always a bad thing when software is released to the public too soon in order to satisfy some marketing goal.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
I'm not sure we have the numbers in for that yet.... :P
Maybe some of us working on LCD computer screens don't like blurry text? I am not a "printer" so I could care less if my fonts are sharper than printed. The lack of font on-screen sharpness is one of the reasons I still haven't switched to macs.
All your other blue-eyed optimism aside, this is particularly funny:
and won't go thunk in the night when Bill Gates "upgrades" things to break your work
You know, it's really open source software that's known for making arbitrary upgrades that break backwards compatibility (and keeping version numbers below 1 so they have an excuse - hey, it's just beta!), while Windows goes to great pains to preserve backwards compatibility at all costs, even at the detriment of the system as a whole.
Then the same half a million downloaded it again the next day for the bug fixes.
There's nothing wrong with anything - Phillip J. Fry
Doubtful. I only downloaded it to test websites I build. I never much liked it on Mac OS and I like it even less out of its natural environment.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
I downloaded the Safari Beta.
Three times. Make sure I'm counted in the MILLION INSTALL MARCH figures.
First time: locked up my system during install.
Second time: installed fine, but there was no menu bar text and my keyboard was somehow disabled, because when I found the search box in Apple's default page (the cursor was 15px down and right of where it should have been), that didn't take input the same way the address bar didn't take input.
Third time: after a fresh restart and a check to make sure that there was no residual information from either previous install - almost the same result as my second try. This time, though, the menus dropped down when I clicked where they should be, but there was still no text in any of it. Still no use of my keyboard.
I get that a Beta is a Beta, but since when is Apple in the business of releasing shitty software? I know this won't cool the HARDCORE MAC FANBOYS' ardor for their beloved white boxes, but maybe people who just like their iPods will start to understand that Apple has surged all the way to 5% of the market (or whatever) for a reason - they're just not ready to write software that runs outside their little sandbox.
10 Million more Windows crashes reported.
Of course, the question is: Who gets the blame over this. Microsoft, or Fake Steve Jobs?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Im not sure why everyone assumes you would use FF if you knew it existed. Ive been a web dev for a long time, and still use IE as my default browser. It works with the add-in software I have, and Im seeing web sites as MOST people see them - kind of a clincher in the profession if you ask me. Of course I have all major browsers installed, and the new Safari is nice for testing on my PC for sure.
FF is not the end all be all of browsers - this is slashdot, so I know Im being blasphemous!
But hey, I still use tables for layout, so what do I know...
an interface doesn't have to be graphical, that's why it's called a command line interface :P But yes, I was referring more specifically to the gui's made available via KDE, Gnome, Fluxbox, etc etc.
I love my sig.
Only in a Mac Land, the trolls are funny. Way to go Mac Moderators.
And neither runs ActiveX, meaning IE won't go away any time soon.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Step 0: Use Firefox. Step 1: Read on Slashdot, "Safari on Windows" Step 2: Google, "Safari download" Step 3: Safari downloaded. Step 4: Safari installed. Step 5: Wow! Safari is so coool. Step 6: Import bookmarks from Firefox. Step 7: Open 5-6 heavy websites, like Calendar, Gmail on both Firefox and Safari. Step 8: Safari is able to render the pages better, wow!! Step 9: Close Firefox. Step 9: After 5 minutes, safari crashed. Step 10: Open Firefox, forget Safari. Step 11: Happy!!
Spam: Any activity on internet to gain popularity without paying to advertising companies like Google.
You mean by getting it posted on slashdot? If I hadn't seen it here, I wouldn't even know it came out for Windows. Slashdot should start charging for these ads... I mean stories...
Safari offers two things that no other browser offers: Apple's font rendering and color space recognition of images. Lots of Windows people seem to hate Apple's font rendering, but as a Mac user I prefer it. Windows font rendering seems ugly.
The color space stuff is a big deal to photographers, and it's very annoying that no other browser seems to respect the ICC color profile in images. I've seen a lot of discussion about Firefox versus Safari on the Mac and why Firefox seems to "wash out" images. It's really a shame Firefox doesn't respect ICC color profiles, it's such an obvious thing for a browser to do.
So maybe yeah, Safari isn't as "powerful" as Firefox or MSIE. But it offers an easy-to-use, standards-compliant browsing experience with a level of display rendering not found in other browsers. Many people may not be impressed, but just as many may find it more to their liking. Time will tell.
tried it.
No pornzilla; No navigation with mouse buttons 4&5. Useless crap.
this is a niche product for niche people.
controls are dumbed down too much for me.
They're using their grammar skills there.
There is a difference in philosophy: Windows must keep compatibility because of angry customers willing to keep using a bunch of valuable software they bought. On the other hand, as you can upgrade your FOSS without licensing costs, they don't care so much about that.
Anyway, I guess most Microsoft upgrade breakages are because of sloppiness, not because planned behavior changes.
Breakages in daily updates are a different matter, I guess based not only on sloppiness, but on keeping building their castle of cards becoming impossible. There you appreciate FOSS fixing problems before compatibility inconveniences become compatibility nightmares.
Got Pike?
Or at least that is what I was told by several people numerous times in the last Safari thread. Why are end users downloading and running this "SDK" as if it is an actual browser?
Either its a browser or its an SDK. It doesn't change its role based on whether the news is good or bad.
For the reasons you state, I somewhat agree; KDE 4.0 probably won't be nearly as good on Windows (or Mac) as it will be on Free operating systems (i.e., ones using Xorg or X11 in general), but it's worth trying. Show Windows users all the great things they are missing when their software is free and other developers can add on, fix, secure, and generally improve on others' work in order to release the best software possible. Also, it's good for us who may be forced to use Windows temporarily in some situations beyond our control.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
Sorry to reply twice, but I got curious because I didn't notice the right mouse not working. I went and tried it. The right mouse button works just like it does for Firefox.
What the hell are you tlkaing about?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I like the look and feel of Safari. Yes, shortcuts don't work, it doesn't have the flashblok and etc.. but I use it just from from time to time.. to get a little change.. Gmail works fine with it and there is no need for adblock/flashblock there..
It's a change, from the clumsy Firefox.. Everything is so smooth with Safari.. When I saw Safari, I said to my self - if I had the money to spend, I'd buy a Mac..
I wonder how many people will buy a Mac, just because they saw Safari on Windows.. I know I would.
Ha, there is a nice feature right there - in Safari you can resize your textboxes (the multi-lines ones..). That's awesome!
And numerous other instances that give lie to your statement that "... Windows goes to great pains to preserve backwards compatibility at all costs ..."
The phrase was "DOS isn't done..."
Windows is not DOS. In fact, virtually every single design bug in windows can be attributed to either a desire to maintain backwards compataibility, or a final decision to draw a line and say "NO! Bad developer!"
And it was completely false anyway, they never actively worked to break 1-2-3.
FC Closer
I'm a linux fan (for 10+ years), but what has kept me from taking Konqueror seriously were some rather unfortunate development decisions with respect to the UI. One thing in particular that drove me away was the bookmarks menu that hijacks the entire screen. I realize that some people actually like this (I for the life of me can't figure out why), but it was enough of an irritant for me to consider something else. Firefox has been my preferred browser ever since.
... from a Mac user's perspective, looks about as appealing as old 80x25 terminal text. Text on a PC looks anaemic and blocky compared to properly-rendered text on a Mac.
Now this is just my opinion, and let's face it - it's all totally subjective anyway - but there's no way I'd be happy with that sort of text output.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
I'm always amazed at what people will download. I used to have a plug-in for Softimage|3D, the high-end animation system, on my web site. To download it, you even had to fill out a form. Yet thousands of people downloaded it, more than could possibly use it for anything. Even after I added large type warnings that you must have Softimage|3D to use this thing, there were still people downloading it. Even after Softimage|3D was discontinued.
Yesterday I downloaded it, installed it, used it to browse a couple of most common web sites (CNN, Yahoo, Google, Slashdot!, etc). Well, it's as bad as iTune and Quicktime for Windows. Slow, ugly, and the most important thing for a browser, page rendering. I know it's a beta, but it's from Apple, not from some kids lived in the basement. Used it for 2-3 minute, got enough of it, I uninstalled it (uninstall was pretty quick!).
Default your Oracle EBS with success !
I used Safari for about 10 minutes, realised it was a pre-alpha mess and have no intention of using again. I expect if 1 million people did download it (which sounds like puffery), that many were like me. Perhaps if Apple pull their finger out and produce a Windows look & feel version I may give it another shot. Otherwise I don't see much draw.
Hm? PithHelmet works great with Safari on the Mac to block ads.
There is a difference in philosophy: Windows must keep compatibility because of angry customers willing to keep using a bunch of valuable software they bought. On the other hand, as you can upgrade your FOSS without licensing costs, they don't care so much about that.
No licensing costs, sure, but it is only free if your time is worth nothing to you.
In the best case, you can recompile a fresh version. In the intermediate case, you have to deal with all the changes in the new version of your software, update configurations, fix breakages, teach your employees the new version... And in the worst case, the software is abandoned and not updated for the changes in its dependencies, meaning you either have to spend a huge effort to learn and update the code, or you're just dead.
You know, it's really open source software that's known for making arbitrary upgrades that break backwards compatibility ...
That makes no sense and contradicts experience. I've been using PCs since 1989 and have no attachment to any tech company outside of using their stuff. Non free software is more jerky and harder on the user by far than free software.
In six years of Debian desktop use, this has hardly been an issue for me. I've done dist-upgrades for three different releases and they all worked. The last two times, from Woody to Sarge and then from Sarge to Etch, were perfect. All along the software has played nice - Gnome works well under KDE, KDE under Gnome, everything under Window Maker, Enlightenment etc. I can not only cut and paste across applications, I can do it across the network, through multiple hops.
I can compare that to more than ten years of Windoze desktop use before XP and what people tell me about it since, but there's really no comparing the two. The M$ upgrade train is effective. Everything you have degrades, even if you are able to use it, and the effort required to keep things up forces you to buy new shit which breaks your old work. The platform itself has been devastated by M$ and is now basically M$ only. M$ has driven all competition away whenever there's a buck to be made and they do it at everyone else's expense, especially the poor end user who ends up having to redo all of their work.
The only problems I have with free software is when I try to mix it up with non free. The non free people are unable to co-operate and their shit gets broken when changes are made. It's brittle and the more of it you have, the closer you get to the M$ experience.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Konqueror though... Well, it even renders Slashdot funny, when Safari doesn't. It cuts off the ends of posts constantly, and things like the reply links don't appear quite often. No other browser has this problem.
I have not noticed those problems on Etch. There were some minor issues with discussion 2, but those cleared up long ago.
It takes months to discover the KDE way of doing things, but it's almost always easier. Simple things, like split panes, go a long way in many situations but people who have not used them since Win3.1 will take a while to discover how useful they are.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Basically the Safari fires the onload event before the document is ready. This gives the mistaken impression in some test suites that it is faster than it really is.
l
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/safaribenchmarks.htm
It has really nice font smoothing. Superior to firefox+windows in that respect. The address bar as progress bar is neat also.
That said, I'm probably among the 100 people in the world that actually use the keyword feature of firefox. Meaning I type 'wiki term' in my address bar and it searches wikipedia for that term, with similar keywords for other common searches. This page gives you an idea of what you can do with the firefox keywords. I prefer not to display the search bar.
Safari won't let you set up keywords for searching different sites from you address bar, and that's a deal-breaker for me.
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
I think you misunderstood: Windows send crash reports to MS for all application crashes, not just Windows crashes.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
...maybe 500,000 installs (seeing as how they probably had a lot of duplicate downloads due to the bugfix release)
???,000 installs. 1 download != 1 installation.
???,000 switchers. Probably most people installed it to try it, not to immediately and forever switch. How many will adapt it as their default browser? Perhaps a very small number, considering the quality of the competition and the bugginess of the beta.
Also, didn't Steve Jobs announce in the WWDC 07 keynote that they now had something like 900,000 developers? Wouldn't that seem to imply that about that many might need to download Safari for development and testing?
1 million in 2 days sounds like a lot, but let's look at real web usage statistics (hard as they may be to come by, given user agent spoofing), and not get caught up with the number of times the installer has been downloaded.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I dowmnloaded Safari twice; first to see what the hype was about and the second time because of the almost immediate bug-release fixes. One of the first things I tried was to open an html file (as it so happens, my bookmarks.html file from Firefox) on my hard drive, just like IE, Firefox, Opera, SeaMonkey, Dillo, Konqueror, and any number of other browsers (on multiple OS's). Safari kept telling me it couldn't open it. I have already deleted it from my machine. I'll try it again when it works!
If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?
Actually, if there's one fatal flaw in Windows, it's an excess of backwards -- and longitudinal -- compatibility. It leaves it with kludges all over the place, and inevitable security holes.
I tried to run Safari in PClinuxOs but no luck...
Bill Gates said:"I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine" My favorite number is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74
Can you provide a link to this softimage thingy? I'd like to download it to check it out.
So, now you can not even see which one was moderated funny? Thanks for confirming my belief that this is example of blatant fanboism.
Safari for Windows uninstalled over 999,000 times!
> If these downloads manifested into regular Safari users,
Umm, yeah, because we all know that most of the people who download a new software release the first week it's available are regular users -- not, say, people who pay close attention to tech news because it's their job. No way could this be 10% of the world's web developers saying, "Oh, hey, I should grab that and test my stuff in it."
I'm not saying Safari *won't* end up being adopted by end users, but the first few days it's available? Come on, end users haven't even heard it's available yet. 90% of those downloads are from people who found out by scanning or even reading coverage of WWDC. Practically all of them keep multiple browsers around all the time. The first week's download numbers are an indication of interest in the tech community, but that's all.
You want to see if regular users are picking it up, wait until the developer rush dies off and *then* look at the download numbers. You want to see if people are starting to use it as their regular browser, you don't look at download numbers, but at access logs and so forth -- and you compare against the same week/month/quarter of the previous year, at the same sample of sites.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
You mean by getting it posted on slashdot?
Part of it, yes.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Win 3.1 had split window panes? Wow, I was missing out on something back in the day (seriously; I use them in vim most often, though). Hmm, oh well...
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
The things that people will complain about! Be luckly that you're not still working with 16bit Windows applications, cooperative multitasking, or Xaw widgets. Sheesh, kids these days!
If that one of the biggest drawbacks of the Linux desktop, then I think "our" job is done. Besides, its personal preference, which interestingly enough, is provided to you in Linux. You have an almost limitless ability to customize your widgets and window borders, it can look like XP or Vista if you want it to. Personally, I use the Human theme from Ubuntu with Beryl.
Really, Linux won the "pretty graphical interface" award before Y2K, when GTK1 came around to replace Xaw/Athena. Even as ugly as GTK1 was, it was still well beyond Microsoft's toolkit, graphically. The Linux desktop, graphically, was second place only to OSX until Compiz came around... and with that, Linux still beat Microsoft to the table.
As a free software user, the issue does not exist. ...As long as you use mainstream, approved software. As soon as you don't, trouble starts encroaching.
As a developer, the issue is trivial. Improvements to gcc, fftw, libgd...
I have several times had to change my projects because of changes to specifically gcc and libgd, among many others. For a couple of projects, I have just not found the time or energy to fix them, and just let them bit-rot.
Someone please tell me what I'm missing here. From what *I* see, there is absolutely NO comparison as to which is more readable. Safari is more readable on MY Windows XP Pro than either IE or FF, by a mile. I have a vanilla install of XP. Haven't done a thing to it. It's about as stock as you can get. I installed FF and Safari, then went to cnn.com. I have a screen shot of all 3 browsers side by side, and at the risk of eating up all my download allotment, here is the URL: http://idisk.mac.com/Wingsy-Public/ScreenShot001.b mp
Is there anyone out there who can honestly say that FF or IE is more readable? They both look like they came right out of a dot matrix printer. Can someone post a screenshot where they think Safari is the least readable (if it's different from mine)?
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
from what i can gather c++ in linux is a mess!
they keep putting out new versions of the standard C++ library. Code using different versions of that libary can't be loaded by the same process without risking crashes even if the library interfaces stick to plain C constructs. Worse they keep making the complier stricter so you can't just recompile stuff to get it to the same libstdc++ version.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Despite being a forced upgrade on most Windoze platforms
hardly a forced upgrade, i haven't installed it myself but iirc you have to allow "windows genuine advantage notifications" onto your system (something i'd rather not do even though i use legit windows, it just seems like another thing that could go wrong) and i think you have to agree to a specific license agreement for it as well.
and its not availble (at least without some cracking work) for windows versions other than XP SP2 and vista.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
... the number of users who re-downloaded the beta following the recent security fix? The legitimate figure is probably closer to 500,000 users who downloaded it twice.
8==8 Bones 8==8
She'd be 'your fucked up aunt with balls'.
eleven plus two / twelve plus one
Please consider studying a bit on the importance of open standards in the technology world. Many of the things that people take for granted today exist due to open standards, and might well not exist without them, or might exist but not be affordable to you. The issue is not about snobbery, that's just a FUD smokescreen you're blowing. You may like Microsoft and their products, but they have a long and well documented history of trying to crush open standards in order to prevent competition in the marketplace of software and technology. You may like Internet Explorer, but it has a well documented history of broken support for open standards. These things are not "bugs" or they would get fixed. The fact that they don't get fixed, for years and years, is indication that to some degree Microsoft intends IE to depart from the open standards, so that the "MUCH MUCH LARGER GROUP OF PEOPLE", sheeple that they are, will follow the herd to Microsoft land, and help cement Microsoft dominance by building broken web sites. If you own significant amounts of MSFT, then perhaps buy building broken web sites you are contributing to your own success. However, if you owned that much MSFT, you wouldn't be building web sites, would you?
I suggest starting here:
Open Standards: Principles and Practice
Open Standard
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Win 3.1 had split window panes?
The file manager did as did most competing file managers of the day. You could split it horizontally or vertically and subdivide the result, then drag and drop files and directories around your system and over the primitive networks of the day. For some reason, this was dropped by the replacement in windows 95 and beyond.
The equivalent capability was not dropped from free software and the KDE people seem to have generalized it into almost all KDE software.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I know it's a bit much to expect everyone to watch the Apple Developer's conference webcast, so I'll summarize the it for you:
Safari for Windows exists so that web developers can test/fix their sites without actually buying a Mac/iPhone
Apple doesn't care if you use Safari as your default browser. Safari makes no money for Apple. Macs and iPhones make money for Apple. Apple wants to keep its Mac and iPhone customers happy; hence, it wants as many websites as possible to work in Safari. Safari:Windows mimics Safari:Mac, including font rendering, resizing, and keyboard shortcuts so you can see how your site behaves on a Mac.
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
What you are missing is that Microsoft intentionally ships a browser that departs, intentionally, from open standards. It's an effort to control the standards to lock out other users, and it's an intentional abuse of monopoly power. They know that so long as they control the vast majority (recently 95%, but now down to about 80%) of the browser market, they can largely prevent other platforms from rising in influence. Furthermore, "OSS Snobs" may well exist, but this question has nothing to do with religious issues. You see, the vast majority of the people developing web sites didn't choose to "develop against IE". They were forced to expend greater effort to build web sites to support a single broken browser than they would have spent to use standards that support all browsers on all platforms. They did this not through a free choice, but through coercion by Microsoft, which abused its dominant desktop position, to the detriment of the entire community of users and developers.
YOU CAN YELL ALL YOU WANT, BUT YOU ARE STILL WRONG
Seriously, mods, that is an abuse of the mod system. You will be punished by the meta-mods.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
The forgotten detail.
He may have a bad reputation, but he's right about one thing - KDE is desktop-web integration as it should've been done. For example, you can take any kioslave-supported file source (normal files, HTTP, SFTP, and CD audio tracks, for example) and use it in any kioslave-supporting application (KWord, image viewers, website file upload forms, ...). The web browser and file browser are integrated in a way that's logical, not particularly vulnerable to security holes, and allows fully-tabbed directory browsing (with the ability to open any supported file in a new tab).
I am a Windows user for the most part and have used IE and FF for years now. The best things about Safari are the search and the speed. However, those features aren't nearly enough to make me switch. I just don't like the way it works. Even little things like hitting Ctrl+Enter and all the text in the address bar highlighting on the first click are missing. It's like a pulled muscle in that you don't know how often you use features until they are gone. Overall it's an adequate browser, but it doesn't even come close to making me want to use it regularly.
Pimping my blog? Last time I checked, I can't post images of the differences in a /. post, and besides, since I had already written up my comments 2 days ago, it didn't seem right to just repost them.
No problem, I'm happy, got my first -1 post. That hasn't happened in a *long* time. Guess the Mac fanboys are much worse then the Linux ones.
Random Musings
Thanks for posting that. I think I agree with you, and I wonder if the difference is that I'm running Vista, not XP. Given your screen shot, I like Safari's better.
Random Musings
I'm sure most people that downloaded it, got it just for testing their sites in it more than using it.
I'm assuming this includes multiples for people who downloaded the program eight times to try and make it install right?
Then again, two million may just parse the size of fanboydom (including both pre- and post-op Switchers), so let's not be hasty. Surely somebody's out there suffering along with Windows Safari and congratulating himself for running badly-performing, under-featured beta code. Lord knows, he's probably blogging about his own ultimate funkiness right now...
Since when do you display a sound in any browser? Sounds may be played, but unless you've got a gift for sensing auditory feedback through your eyes, my comment doesn't really apply.
That said, I suppose you'd approach incorporating aural feedback into your page the same way you would any other standard would be incorporated: by invoking a standard declaration in a style sheet or a standard element on a page. That way, user agents that didn't understand the syntax would at least finish processing the page and just leave out the piece it didn't understand, as any well-behaved, standards-compliant user agent should -- the point being that one element of a page should not keep the entire page from rendering.
- If your country didn't have a standardized currency, then every bank would print its own money. You might not be able to buy things with your money at places you want to shop, or you might need to pay a 10% conversion fee to use money from your own bank. The bank you use might be determined for you by a co-marketing agreement with the company that you work for. Oh, you can use a different bank if you want, but you have to pay a 10% conversion fee every time you get a paycheck.
- If cars didn't run on standard fuel, you might need to carefully plan your trips so that the type of fuel used by your car was available along your route. There would be some routes that you couldn't take, because your type of fuel wasn't available. You might need to own more than one car, or pay several thousand dollars for a conversion kit to use a different brand of fuel with your car.
- If standards for electric generation and distribution didn't exist, then you might need to buy appliances which were custom made for your electric utility company. They might control the appliances you can buy through special co-marketing agreements with appliance vendors. In your neighborhood, you might not be able to choose between a Kitchen Aid mixer and a Sunbeam because your utility company chose for you.
I didn't label you a Microsoft fanboy, you merely said that I did that. Putting words in my mouth is a logical fallacy knows as a straw man argument. As it happens, I have recently begun to chastise people for using the term "fanboy" in these discussions. It has become entirely too frequent a ploy used by those who are unable to construct a decent argument. Calling someone a fanboi is merely an ad hominum attack, by the way.Microsoft is a giant bureaucracy. I don't love it or hate it. I understand it better than you do, perhaps because it's not an emotional issue for me. You may be projecting.
Come in off the ledge. IE is broken in some well documented ways (see: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish). Fortunately, for the most part, most of those broken things can be accommodated with "hacks" such that web sites can be constructed in a standards-compliant way, and still render correctly in IE (by emitting bug-for-bug-IE-compliant HTML to IE, and normal unbroken code to other browsers). I'd guess you even know what some of those are.
If you cared about your customers, you wouldn't build web sites that exclude 15% of them, unless you are simply hostile in general, which might well be the case, i don't know. Since you're posting as a logged in user, I'd like to think you value your reputation a little more than that.
Ratchet down the vitriol a notch or two, and seriously, step back and think about the importance of standards. . I'm really not kidding. If you build web sites with an attitude like yours, you're going to be in serious need of an attitude adjustment about this time next year when twenty to thirty percent of web users are running web browsers which are standards compliant and those users are demanding support for standards compliant browsers like FireFox 3, Safari 3 on Windows and Macintosh, Opera 9, and the Nokia WebKit-based browser.
Finally, you have not elected to click my "friend" button, and you are doing a bit of yelling. I would appreciate it if you didn't abuse the term "my friend" by using it as a snide remark. If you want to convince me of the truth of your claims, then make a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Is it just the choice of default font? I could imagine safari, in order to keep its mac look, installed some darker fonts. It's the first thing i do after a fresh FF installation. Am I the only one who don't like Arial?
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't
You probably already know this, but Safari has some pretty cool JavaScript debugging options: Drosera, Web Inspector.
I downloaded Safari for two reasons. One, mere curiosity. I just wanted a sense of what a browser looks and acts like when there's no right mouse menu, limited menu choices, etc.
But the real reason is that I do web applications and web site programming and nobody in my company has a Mac. I used it to test whether or not the DHTML/AJAX, CSS, and other browser-conflicting codes we used will actually still work, based on the assumption that what I saw in Safari for Windows would be what Safari for Mac would see.
Fortunately, I didn't see any problems in my code that needed to be dealt with. It rendered and ran everything correctly.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
There are two problems. The first is that GCC has, over the last few years (since version 3, largely), made an effort to conform to the language specifications properly. Previously, it would emit working code for a lot of non-standard code. Each new release has turned some of these into warnings, and then errors. This made a lot of old code not compile.
The other problem is that the C++ ABI defined by GCC changed with version 3.2 and 3.4/4.0 (3.4 and 4.0 are compatible, but the two branches were available concurrently). It is possible to have libraries compiled with both versions of the ABI on the same system, and you need to do this if you have applications that were compiled with the two versions.
These two combined to produce some problems. Some libraries relied on old compiler behaviour, while applications that depended on them depended on newer compiler behaviour (or vice versa) meaning you couldn't compile the app and library with the same version of the compiler, and thus had an ABI mismatch (although, I believe, you can still tell the new compiler to use the old ABI if you want).
For the most part, it wasn't an issue. I don't use Linux, but FreeBSD also allows GCC to define its ABI and I didn't notice any problems from the ABI change.
The reason Windows doesn't have this issue is that Microsoft had a C++ compiler long before C++ was standardised (in 1998), and forced other compilers to use their ABI if they wanted to be able to link to the Microsoft Foundation Classes. I don't know if Microsoft has had any problems with their ABI not supporting language features (the GCC changes were required because of this), but since their ABI dates back to several years before the standard, and their compiler was only about 60% compliant until very recently, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they did, although I don't know what they'd have done about it.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I don't have anything turned off, or on. I haven't touched it.
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.