Monday, June 11, 2007

Safari on Windows

This is going to seem anti-climactic to my Mac friends but the WWDC announcement that Windows will finally get a decent web browser made by an innovative company is absolutely fantastic. For those that haven't heard, Apple announced Safari 3 is going to be released for Windows. The beta is posted and everyone should jump in and get their feet wet.

Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against Firefox, but I want something designed by an innovator. Something like Firefox that is groupthink designed just doesn't strike me as a product that will ever push the envelope much. Opera is very nice but you have to pay for it.

I guess time will tell if this latest strategy by Apple works but I applaud them for giving this a go.

Incidentally, I've spent about 5 minutes with Safari on the PC and it is lightning fast and has great looking, easy to read text. Personally though, Apple made a big mistake by not letting us grab the edges of the window and resize it. Apple's been hammered about this before even in OS X so it strikes me as odd they wouldn't have this feature in a Windows version of Safari where it fits in naturally. Thank goodness it is still a beta and they have time to fix this.

3 comments:

Skudge said...

I'm all for browser choice, and I like things about both Firefox and Safari.

But as a web developer, more browsers used by more people on more platforms means more headaches for me.

Why can't these companies get together and agree on a rendering engine? The can have their feature sets, their interfaces, their branding and whatever. But let me write one CSS document that's going to render my page the same way on all these browsers.

If I set a width to 100, and padding to 10, I want the same size @!%&$# box no matter what browser is rendering it. Is that so much to ask?

And then, not only do the browsers do it differently, they do it differently from version to version. IE 7 does things differently than IE 6 did.

I advocate violence on this matter.

XenoChron said...

Didn't they tell you? If you download a copy of the Safari beta for Windows, they'll send you a baseball bat to take out your frustrations on all other web browser developers. Just one more thing...it turns to Jello if you get close to an Apple employee!

Skudge said...

OOOoOoOoooooOOOOOoOooOOOoh. THAT'S a feature.