Apple to release Safari browser for Windows - Page 3

Okay, I just installed the Safari 3 Beta for MacOS X. I'm on an original Aluminum 12" Powerbook G4 (867 Mhz, 640 Mb RAM).

My initial reaction is not fit to print on a family forum.

Safari 3 is fast. I mean, incredibly fast compared to Safari 2 on the same machine. I don't know what they hell they did, but after the initial app loading (and slow Apple Start page load), everything I've brought up has been lightning quick.

It also partially recognizes some of the maintenance scripts I use on Wikipedia through Firefox, so it looks like they're improving compatibility too. Hopefully the full build in Leopard will take care of those last few issues.

As for flash-heavy sites, I hit up Adventure Quest... and it was playable! Not perfect, but that may be my older system. For the most part, it was just as good as any other browser at handling the Flash content.

Going to play around, see what other features they've got in here, but overall I'm ecstatic. This makes my browsing much better, and I'm switching back from Camino for now.

It's a LOT faster for me on an iMac G5. In particular, sourceforge.net's javascript menus are now pretty nippy and a few of the sites I've written that use scriptaculous/prototype AJAX on are blazing fast.

It seems to cache the javascript quite a bit better.

Remount the Safari3Beta.dmg that you would have downloaded and run the uninstall.pkg. I've done it, & it works fine. My earlier posts today were done with Safari 3 beta, this is being done on safari 2
Cheers

I just downloaded the beta for OSX, and damn it's fast. It's noticeably faster than Camino 1.5, and I didn't think that was possible. Too bad the Java supports is still shitty!

Ok, here is the reasons for Safari on Windows:

1) More people who use it, means more attention to it. That can only help the Web Standards group (instead of the dreaded IE only crap).
2) iPhone, as many have said before.
3) History 101: iTunes. Remember how many of you said the same thing about that? Now look where we are.
4) Apple (al. la Steve) is playing a very big game of Chess with all of the major computer players out there. Safari on its own does not pose a threat to anyone. Safari + iTunes + iChat (possibly) + iPod + iPhone... That is a very large equation that cannot be ignored.

This dawned on me in a different way. Considering how much in bed Apple and Google are becoming, Safari would be the safest and easiest (for regular consumers) way of creating a standard web application that will work with everything Google creates without having to worry about which browser you have. Mac, Windows and mobile surfing on iPhone. Create once and no need to test on multiple browsers.

A time is soon coming where Apple and Google will together challenge the Microsoft hegemony in the future. Maybe not for the corporate desktop OS or Exchange (right away), but anything else is up for grabs.

Truly, Microsoft has the potential to utilize its resources to blow away Apple and Google, but there seems to be a genuine systemic rot in that company.

Most likely you've installed some plugin, or even more likely, moved safari out of the applications folder.

It seems the installer will only update the 10.4.9 safari in a specific place. and Of course will uninstall the same.

It's pretty snazzy, and it passes the acid2-test. So fast+standard is pretty good. Haven't had a problem rendering that I've seen yet in the short time.

Speed on mac pro is definitely beating the competition.

Some neat features. Search is nice, but if you're a forum/blog regular, the resizing of the message window = A++.

I like Firefox better as it has way more extensions, but this is just as good. Since I visit forums a good amount. Now if only pith-helmet gets updated, I'm set.

So I guess with the delay of 10.5, they had time to polish a lot of things. Bitter sweet thing

I just installed it on my Vista PC. The font rendering sucks. Not quite as bad as Linux but nothing compared to Windows. I changed the font smoothing to "light" and it looks better but not much. I doubt many PC users will be switching to Safari anytime soon but it will be great for Windows web developers to test Mac compatibility. It is very fast though.

I noticed this right away, too. (I really like the way Windows does window resizing better than the Mac). iTunes on Windows, however, does the resizing properly; so I'm guessing it's a bug - and reported it through the Safari bug reporter.

- Jasen.

Don't really see how MS could 'blow away' Apple and Google. It's not like they're not already trying hard.

They spent several years and many billions, and Vista was the best they could come up with. And they could (and may) plunk down an insane wadd of cash and buy Yahoo... but even that wouldn't come anywhere near crushing Google.

I think MS is doing about the best it can, given the fact that they are MS. If you want a more visionary and competitive company, you'd have to change their corporate DNA... in other words, they'd wouldn't be MS anymore.

Of course, firing or demoting Ballmer might be a good first step... never happen, though.

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I'm having the most bizarre problem and I've searched everywhere and found no solution.

This isn't my screenshot, but I'm having the same problem in XP:

http://www.imagespar.com/img/40bf6c9...8cd669/wtf.PNG

Anyone know how to remedy this? It looks to be a font issue. Thanks!

Anyone figure out how to get mouse gestures into the windows version yet?

Can any .Mac users out there say whether or not the windows version of Safari allows you to sync bookmarks? This would be a useful feature, don't you think?

Has anyone here noticed that, surprisingly, the new browser still uses brushed metal?

I think that's odd, as they seemed to have moved away from that. But I seem to be the only one who likes it, so maybe mine came that way—just for me.

Actually, I like the brushed metal too. A lot. I was a tad ticked-off that they want to get rid of it....

\

I've been looking at the responses over at Ars and it's not gotten an enthusiastic reception.

One criticism, valid IMO, is that it doesn't conform to the windows UI. Having seen the keynote I'd have to agree. It was weird seeing Safari in Win xp. It looked like Parallels in reverse with the mac app virtualized in the windows os.

While it may be necessary to have ported this to windows, I don't see it grabbing a lot of market-share.

So sweet to have Safari running in XP! It seems very sluggish, but I can't decide if this is just because the sites that I'm visiting are already cached in FF. Just for fun, though, I decided to have a look at what Task Manager has to say about Safari: memory usage for Safari, 91,412 K; for FF, 25,604 K. It's even more of a system-hog than iTunes is in XP! Well, it's kinda cool to look at, but I think it's about time to un-install: that was a fun 15 minutes of my life...

Under XP, I tried to take a window capture with snagit, it's like it has 3 or 4 seperate windows and had to resort to a screen capture to get the full window.

Definately not Bills Windows api .... also couldn't resize the window like a 'normal' windows (grabbing any size and shrinking/expanding. That's ONE feature I wish OSX had, but looks like Apple is taking it away from Windows as well ! ;-)

Some off-the-bat reasons why I probably won't be able to switch (regardless of a supposed speed bump)

* No favicons in the bookmarks toolbar (I had such a cool favicon only toolbar, now I would have to describe each bookmark and read the tags)
* No Ctrl-Enter for www.----.com insertion
* Interferes with my hiding taskbar (doesn't pop up when I mouse over bottom edge of screen when using Safari)
* Hovering over browser buttons doesn't provide any info (annoying but I will figure out the cryptic icons)
* No quick "X" for closing several tabs (although FF removed this with 2.0, I installed it as an extension)
* Keeps resizing the window on me (upon returning after switching apps) [side note: a feature in general that I am shocked is not availabe on a Mac (I am even more shocked that no one talks about it) is that you can't toggle a window to full size easily like in Windows

I have to say that although I usually find Apple products to be really well thought out and in most cases light years ahead of Microsoft in innovation, they seem to always miss a couple of crucial things that scare me away. Safari for Windows has plenty of annoyances and therefore [unless updated] is not for me.

So Safari for Windows uses OSX styles, including fonts, window zoom/minimise, & position of application names. But iTunes does not (on OSX, iTunes is Carbon right?)

Between Safari & iTunes/Quicktime, are Apple's CoreVideo/CoreAudio/Webkit now indirectly on Windows?

It runs great and looks great on my Mac but until the PC version gives me the option to TURN OFF FONT SMOOTHING then I cannot use it.

I actually like the font rendering. In some ways, the fonts are easier to read for me.

Greg: I was wondering something similar. There are a few little animation effects which happen that are out of the norm compared to Windows XP movements. They seem to happen smoothly and I was wondering what was driving them.

The public perception may be that way, but I really don't think it's true... IMO, switching at random between any of the modern web browsers (IE, FF, Safari, Konqueror, you name it) is already a no-brainer. The browsers can differentiate themselves by features (speed, standards compliance, extras, etc) but as far as I've seen, the differences in core user experience are so subtle that I don't even notice them.

It appears that the font used to display menus in Safari, and all of the text on the Apple Start Page, Lucida Grande, has not been installed. Its available to download here, this should work.

What the hellll? The tabs thing doesn't work on OS X? I can reorganize but drag tabs off the bookmark bar just makes them disappear in a puff of smoke???

oops... I'm a moron. I was dragging around my bookmarks instead of my tabs... dumbass, lol

Same for me (slower), but I'll keep it anyway... Strange however that some people here report that it's faster and some other report that it's slower... How comes?

What amazed me and made me laugh was that one:



It reminded me Vista when I saw that I was going "Oh please no! Don't do that to me only because there's a version of Safari for Vista now!"

I think that's also available in 2.0 but anyway I've never seen that before... Fortunately I quickly found out how to deactivate it...

Enjoy your day!

Update: I had to switch back to Version 2 because MSN Messenger wouldn't work properly with Safari 3.0 installed ... Quite strange... Sadly all my friends are using messnger and I don't like aMSN or MercuryMessnger so: Goodbye Safari 3.0!

Ive had mixed experiences. The beta installed and uninstalled fine on both my MacBook and my parents Windows XP machine. Font rendering looks great on the PC. Also, as previously noted by other users, the animations, such as the sheet for adding a bookmark, a running incredibly smoothly, unlike other experiences in iTunes with Cover Flow and the blessed Start Menu. Perhaps they ported over Core Image too?

On OS X, it installed with out a hitch and was perfectly usable. I do have one small gripe though: it buggered up iTunes so that the only thing it could display was the iTunes Store, everything else I clicked on in the sidebar was blank. I had to revert to Safari 2.0 and reinstall iTunes, which turned out to not be that big a deal. What can you expect from beta software?

I have to say, however, that the browsing experience has become much more pleasurable on both OS X and Windows; now if only they can sort out Cover Flow on XP Ill be happy!

Good job, Apple.

Truth is, I was expecting much more, going from 2 to 3. This seems like a point release.

The new Safari refuses to install itself on my G4 dual 10.4.9
Like others, it doesn't meet some (unnamed) requirements.
What an advertisement for Apple!

Maybe it's because I had deleted the old Safari after it refused to perform the simplest taks; Firefox beat it hands down. Now I can't install the new improved Safari to give it another chance.....

i have not had any problems yet and so far have only installed it on my G4 iBook

crap. how. i've forgotten.

Yes, but its a "no brainer" by geek standards. Joe and Jane Sixpack aren't near as tech savvy. There's also the comfort level involved in using something that looks the same as what you're used to using.

I would agree though that the much larger switcher bait is having Leopard's Finder be very much like iTunes. 300 million Windows users already know how to use iTunes, so they already know how to use the Leopard Finder, and the barrier to switching is lowered. Nice.

Now if only Apple would get more aggressive with its hardware lineup and pricing, switching might become as commonplace as Paris Hilton-in-jail 'news' stories.
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Apple's doing this for the same reason MS made Windows CE, and Windows Mobile look like the Windows computer desktop, even though OSes are COMPLETELY different. Familiarity, as you said.

Looks like we already have people coming up with vulnerabilities of the Safary browser for windoes. Some of these guys will not be informing Apple, instead the will use it.

I suppose another reason for releasing Safari on Windows, besides the "iPhone SDK nonsense", is that it will probably allow Windows users to synchronize their Bookmarks from their PC to their iPhone. Sure, they could have tried converting IE favorites over to the iPhone version of Safari, but this way would be a lot neater.

Who knows, maybe it'll also allow for .Mac synchronization between Safari on a Mac and on Windows...

From what I've read so far, this could be a huge problem for uptake on the platform, and for Apple's game plan. Hope it isn't anything more than teething pain.

If Apple's browser gains a reputation, right out of the gate, of being very insecure, it does exactly the opposite of acting as a trojan horse for switchers-- it instead confirms Windows users prejudices that Apple's claims to being "more secure" than Windows is just because their software doesn't have the high profile of Windows.

"See?", they can say, "As soon as you put Apple's stuff on the majority platform it gets hammered and is revealed to be a house of cards."

Worse, I can't think of a good response.

Java support? Both Camino and Safari use the same Java engine. Or do you mean Javascript?

If so, I've found the javascript support is much improved. The problem that remains is that many javascript scripts like the WYSIWYG editors such as FCKEditor sniff for the browser string and find WebKit and switch off features in the script because Safari 2.0 didn't work the same as IE/FF. Apple added support for the features used by these scripts but the script people themselves now have to fix there sniffer code.



That's because you've a Lucida Grande Font installed that is corrupt. Delete the installed font and it should then work. You can also get around it by moving the font files out of the Safari resources folder and installing them as system fonts.


Safari will just add that anyway if you don't type them and it can't find it. But a bigger question would be why you're not using OpenDNS.com for your name resolution. That even corrects .cmo and other common mistakes.


It does on the Mac so I presume that's just an oversight on Windows.


Because that behaviour sucks. On the Mac the maximise window button has always sized the window to the 'largest size needed to fit all the content' as opposed to stupid behaviour Windows introduced where it maximises it to the entire screen regardless of if you need it that big. As monitors get bigger, the Mac way makes even more sense.



There is more in v3 but you're not seeing it yet as some of it relies on Leopard. eg. Webclips, however I'd disagree, the interface changes are subtle but the engine changes are major, especially javascript and CSS.


That would be David Maynor. Nobody takes him seriously. How can you take any security expert seriously if they refuse to demo the bugs they've found never mind tell the application developer about them.

That's certainly possible. I'm just going by what I'm seeing, and what I'm seeing isn't major, and hasn't fixed some of the bugs that I've already mentioned. Since it's still a beta, I'm not too concerned, but I hope that Apple will have looked at some of them.

I'm not sure those are bugs. Some of them are just things you don't like working that way whereas I'm quite fine with them working that way and others I don't have (like issues with urls beginning irc...)

Perhaps you've a corrupt prefs file for your internet helpers. John Gruber had a similar problem...

http://daringfireball.net/2004/05/internet_helper