Decaflon

Just what eager Mac developers want to learn about at WWDC... Apple spending time developing Windows software. How exciting.

Now all you windows users can have a standards compliant browser too!

FireFox is, and always will be, better than Safari (even on a Mac). Those benchmarks on the Safari site are bogus! I did benchmark tests a few years back and FireFox outperformed Safari- I'm about to go for round two.. (I know lots could have changed since 2005)!

Just what eager Mac developers want to learn about at WWDC... Apple spending time developing Windows software. How exciting.

Good point. But if you think about it, as unexciting as it is, this is pretty important.. Windows = Most computer users. They need to develop for windows..!

If Windows Safari renders the same way Mac Safari does, life could get easier for Web professionals, methinks.

I'm on it right now and I have to say... I'm LOVING every second so far!

I'm just glad I can test designs in Safari now (without asking a friend or heading over to the campus computer lab)!

It's cool I guess, but browsers stopped being hot in 2004. Good for developers though as mentioned already.

Well I found my first bug... it crashes BAD if I hit Print.

The designer in me dreads having ANOTHER browser to support. Because I know it will have some quirks that won't show up for awhile. That being said, I am typing into a lovely box in Safari on Windows right now.

I'm not sure how I like this resizable form field. I guess it's nifty but I can see it causing problems potentially.

I'm not sure how I like this resizable form field. I guess it's nifty but I can see it causing problems potentially.

Looks like that's a Windows-only feature for now, interesting.

I haven't run any speed tests... but this version of Safari definitely renders pages much faster than Firefox.

A good website to try it out is gametrailers.com which is a bit heavy, or the Japanese Square-Enix website. Try loading them with both Firefox and Safari, and certainly you'll notice a big difference in speed.

In my case (with my specifications and connection) the difference was bigger than 5 seconds with the Square Enix site.

@peroty - my website follows standards (with the exception of some 3rd party code) and it looks pretty much the same on all browsers, except for the fonts. So if your site already looks good on Firefox, it will (most) certainly look good on Safari.

@Griffith

My sites follow the same web standards goodness. I'm just saying that down the road we could be looking at little things. Though hopefully not. :)

I've also noticed quite a difference in rendering speed over Firefox as well. Feels zippy and I've not managed to crash it yet (granted, I've not done much on it yet).

Funny: with me it renders "9rules home" as "8qrkdr Gnld". Now that's interesting.

Still looks good though.

Personally speaking, I'm pleased to finally see what my site looks like in Safari (along with ~3% of my visitors), and I'm pleased it looks okay. Not that the code is much good, just complete fluke. But still a smiley day.

And yes, Apple working on Windows users is undoubtedly a good thing. Makes me want to make the big conversion even more...

I'm reading all of this discussion in Safari on Windows, and I like it. If I open too many tabs at one time without giving it a little breathing room, it crashes. But otherwise, it's been OK.

It does look a little odd on Windows, though.

Nils: That's funny - the second phrase is offset alphanumerically by -1. So an H is replaced with a G, a 9 with an 8, an R with a Q, and so on. Not sure what's causing the problem, though.

And if it's crossed anyone's mind if the lovely Lucida Grande comes with Safari, why yes, yes it does.
Go to Program Files -> Safari -> Safari.resources there are lucida grande.ttf and lucida grand bold.ttf files. Drag them to your Windows -> Fonts folder or install then with your font manager.
Source

I like the idea, anything to ease the pain of having to use a windows machine. I'm a bit confused as to why the two versions have different interfaces. Why is the Windows version the smooth iTunes metal whereas the OS X version remains with brushed metal? I want smooth without having to use hacks!

In regards to the Safari benchmarks, remember this is the beta version and not to be confused with the current shipping version. The beta is a lot faster than the current shipping version (2.0.4) I think.

There are a few reasons I'm not ditching Firefox 2 as my browser for Safari... Some of them just nit-picky, some complete deal breakers.

It takes longer than IE7 to load on vista (about 3x the time). Same again for Opera. It's about the same as Firefox.

The fonts are bold. Everywhere. They've done something really naff with their renderer but perhaps that's just an Apple thing.

Don't apple user use their mice for things? Middle click doesn't start a mouse-scroller. Control+Wheel doesn't change the font size. These are little things that I use daily.

Why can't I resize the window from the window header? Or the side borders? Why must I use that little box in the corner?!

Na smell pecker? Aw man.

No Google-suggest?! Argl!!

The installer... OMG the installer... "Would you like to install this?" "Would you like to install that?" How about you just nuke Windows and leave a Mac in its place, why don't you?! No... Please don't...

AND it's no use to me for testing designs because it doesn't have the quirks that current Safari users have to put up with (notably: dodgy form CSS)... But it is nice that they're catching up there,

This probably has to do something with the release of the iPhone. They probably want to sync your bookmarks on Safari with iTunes and then with the iPhone.

Seems like a pretty smart idea to me.

Hm.

Google looks like crud on Safari beta (and on my system).
Every time I try to click anything that is labeled "bookmarks", it crashes.

It's pretty fast though (both at rendering and crashing).

Let's see how this develops.

How does google look any different? I just clicked through a couple areas (personalized home, generic home, maps, search results) and I don't notice anything different from firefox.

Apparently I just have bad luck, because that's what my Safari Beta looks like at both work and at home.

I can't change the address in the bar, and I can't access any browser menus. And I'm pretty sure the default home page is supposed to look better than that.

It makes me so sad, because I love fiddling around with new browsers, and on my system it's useless. :(

Lisa, I got exactly the same at work, but at home it went okay. Strange. If I find out what did it, I'll let you know.

Or if someone else does, give us a hand?

@Nils/Lisa: Something to do with using Mac software on Windows, I suppose. Get a Mac, n00bs!

/Fanboy impression

And how does this profit Apple?

The more people get used to their apps the easier it is for them to see a reason to make the switch. It's like making the iPod Windows compatible... it was a catalyst for many a platform switch.

If you get used to Quicktime/iTunes/Safari etc, then it makes the switch over that much easier. Not to mention it pisses off Microsoft :)

Because now all the Windows [web] developers can make [web] apps for the iPhone.

More developers, more buyers, more profit.

And they earn a small amount from the Safari search box, too. Something like $25million a year - get the Windows crowd on board and that could easily double.

Also, more people using it means more web developers taking Safari support seriously. Who knows, a Google app might support Safari one day.

Safari is the best browser ever, I don't really understand why Apple released it for Windows but just like iTunes boosted sells of iPod for PC users, Safari for PC will contribute to iPhone's compatibility with Win.

^ I answered to computerjoe... because I was asking myself the gain of Apple and I'm pretty sure it's 4 the iPhone

It is fast, but without my Firebug and other FF extensions I'm sticking with FF.

On my Macbook Pro, at least, I find a significant difference in load times and overall "heaviness" of the program itself when comparing Safari and FF.

Safari is lighter and faster, what more could you want?

Safari is lighter and faster, what more could you want?

How about Google Suggest? It just makes looking for things you're unsure about so much easier.

Or what about extensions? Firebug and the Web Developer toolbar make my life bliss. IE Tab helps too. BugMeNot. SearchStatus for keeping up with pageranks and alexa scores. StumbleUpon to procrastination. Screen grab! for capturing an entire page as an image. SiteAdvisor for knowing from inside a google results page which pages could be dangerous. A spell checker that works well. And one more thing... Adblock Plus!

Even customisation? There's comprehensive theming and skinning for those that want to change the way things look.

I might go as far as saying that Firefox on its own isn't much of a browser but when you give it all that, nothing, IMO, comes close to it in terms of how easy it makes things for me.

As I've already said, Safari isn't that fast on Vista -- Opera and IE7 easily beat it on start up and they (yes even IE7) have more features and customisations.

Though I'm posting this message using Safari for Windows, I tend to be agree with Oil.

Since the time I installed Safari 3 Beta on my Win 2003 Server powered workstation, I've found it pretty stable (no bugs, no crashes so far. I must be lucky). The page load speed is indeed faster than other browsers (Opera loads pages quickly but I've to say that Safari beats Opera as far as page heavy page rendering speed is concerned.) Memory and CPU resource usage are highly controlled and that's one of the few things that I'm loving about Safari 3 Beta. And how can I miss the Resizable text fields feature.. It's a wonderful, never-seen-before feature for me.

I'm loving each and every moment spent with this browser (visited more than 150 blogs so far) but I'm certainly not going to switch my current browser (Firefox 2) because of the lack of extensions in Safari.

No matter whatever browser it is, if I'm unable to use the StumbleUpon, Adblock Plus, Web Developer, Firebug, del.icio.us, etc. extensions, I feel like I'm living in the 1980 era!

-A2.0

safari sucks on windows, works fine on my mac. And come on... IE7 is not that bad.