Isn’t it ironic? At the end of 2005, Microsoft decides to discontinue Internet Explorer for Mac support and now in mid-2007, Apple Incorporated decides Safari is coming to Windows. Safari will join iTunes and QuickTime as the third Macintosh application officially ported to the Windows platform. At Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco today, the company announced the availability of the Safari 3 beta for OS X, Windows XP and Windows Vista.
Some of our users are testing the browser with absolutely no problems while others are finding bugs that range from install failures and crashing to incorrect web site rendering and ridiculous memory usage. Safari 3 will most likely go final in time for Leopard’s release in October of this year. Apple is touting Safari as being able to load pages roughly twice as fast as Internet Explorer and 42% faster than Firefox. Is Apple pulling typical marketing antics or are the numbers dead on? You be the judge.
This is BETA software!, please use caution when installing it on your system
Download: Safari 3 Beta
Link: Forum Discussion (Thanks Gaius)
Some of our users are testing the browser with absolutely no problems while others are finding bugs that range from install failures and crashing to incorrect web site rendering and ridiculous memory usage. Safari 3 will most likely go final in time for Leopard’s release in October of this year. Apple is touting Safari as being able to load pages roughly twice as fast as Internet Explorer and 42% faster than Firefox. Is Apple pulling typical marketing antics or are the numbers dead on? You be the judge.
This is BETA software!, please use caution when installing it on your system Download: Safari 3 Beta Link: Forum Discussion (Thanks Gaius)
Don't forget QuickTime
Do not discuss illegal software
Last edited by Chad on 12 Jun 2007 - 16:21
I vote for typical marketing antics.
+ After it has loaded, it looks surprisingly fast for being an Apple port for Windows. Looks easily on par with the competition to me.
- Tons of rendering bugs! All sites I visit have heaps of invisible text. Neowin, a test Google search, ...
- Ate about 100 MB pretty much just by starting it.
Hopefully the downsides will be sorted in time. I'll excuse it for being a beta, but the lots of rendering bugs, even for a public alpha, didn't exactly surprise me positively.
Last edited by Jugalator on 11 Jun 2007 - 20:32
Even Microsoft doesn't really bother to make everything fit in with Vista 1:1; Microsoft Office 2007 and Windows Live Messenger more or less try to emulate Aero, but the difference is quite obvious compared to the real thing. Granted the difference isn't as big as with iTunes, QuickTime and Safari.
Even Microsoft doesn't really bother to make everything fit in with Vista 1:1; Microsoft Office 2007 and Windows Live Messenger more or less try to emulate Aero, but the difference is quite obvious compared to the real thing. Granted the difference isn't as big as with iTunes, QuickTime and Safari.
Oh please, UI doesn't just include graphics. At least Office 2007 and WLM act as you think they would. Safari is too far out to put on a Windows machine. I get no tool tips, no middle click, no right-click when it matters, things in weird places, the list goes on.
OK, I'm not expert at UI, but one of my focuses at university is in it and this whole app should go on a slide titled "Bad User Interfaces." Accessibility is poor, I mean a guy with bad vision will probably fail to read any text on the tool bar thanks to the gray on gray. And if they bother to open the status bar, they'll fail (and even myself with corrective lenses) to read what is on it because of the small fonts combined with the gray on gray text.
Cripes, Apple is touted as being the best at UI yet this fails on so many levels.
cf iTunes, Sony's SonicStage et al
On Mac OS X Safari certainly is. In my opinion anyway.
I'll give it another shot once it's a bit more polished.
Edit: After the install I have the same problems as metal_dragen & jugalator.
I was not able to type anything into the address bar, and none of the menus displayed text. It looks interesting, but highly unusable at the moment.
Last edited by king_of_hearts on 11 Jun 2007 - 20:56
It's a bit weird that developers should be the ones supporting them in the first place. On Mac OS X all native windows are "forced" to use animations like the minimizing effect and drop shadow. What's going on inside the window itself is a different story though.
Last edited by .Neo on 11 Jun 2007 - 21:12
if you hve a Winamp skin with a nice freeform skin and it's own added drop shadow, it would be wair having a OS generated drop shadow around the "virtual" frame of the player. Sometimes forcing your rules on everyone isn't a good idea. actually, generally it isn't. And it's not like adding drop shadow and animation's isn't as simple as adding or removing a flag from the application in the first place. But then again Apple hires the worst developers in the world to make their Windows ports.
I also have plenty of pet peeves.
- Text is blurry as hell, worst implementation of ClearType I've seen.
- Window cannot be minimized by clicking it on the taskbar. Restoring through taskbar is buggy as well.
- If you try to close a maximized window, your mouse has to be exactly on the close button. If your mouse is at the top-right corner of the screen instead, it will actually close the window behind Safari.
This is not going to get more people to switch to Mac.
This is not going to get more people to switch to Mac.
Damn right, I hate skins that do that. Especially when you're used to just throwing your cursor up there and clicking to close.
I haven't had any major issues yet like others have, but already I don't picture myself switching to it, as a web dev. it will be nice for testing but beyond that I'll stick with my IE and FF. One thing that has been annoying is that it will duplicate letters as I type them, wwww.googlle.com, super annoying.
If they blended it into the Vista Windows (Aero) I'd be happier as well, I just can't stand that Silver Metal look, at least they did away with the "Brushed metal"
I"ll be interested to see how the hackers play with Safari now that it is on windows, I expect to be seeing many more security related notices over the next few months in regard to Safari.
On my Vista system the pages load fast alright... probably because not one website displays any text! Neither do the menus, dialog boxes, or any control. Just a big gray window that shows empty boxes as you move the mouse around.
On my XP notebook which has an extremely high resolution display, the font used for menus in usual Apple fashion is not the one specified in my display settings but their choice which is completely unreadable. 1-2 millimeters tall at best. It looks like about 3 pt text.
15 minutes later it was gone from both systems. Apple has to do a lot better than this.
Ugly as hell on Windows. How about a native UI, Apple?
Uninstalled, but should be good enough for testing web code without draggin my MacBook to work.
No problems with fonts, text, rendering, speed, buttons, typing or any of the other problems mentioned. What do you people do to your computers?
Can't open new tabs from bookmarks, address bar or search, cpu jumps about a bit and could use some skins, otherwise very nice browser.
Note that most of the people having problems are running Vista. There seems to be a serious rendering issue around fonts in the Safari beta on Windows Vista where on certain systems whatever the default font Safari is trying to use either does not get installed correctly or it won't render on certain display drivers, etc. Hence you end up with no menus, no fonts in dialogs, no text on buttons, and no text other than text in graphics on any webpage.
Enough people are reporting the problem that it definitely a problem with Safara and not user's computers.
safari: Time to render page: 0.68871 sec / Used 5 queries
Firefox: Time to render page: 0.39732 sec / Used 7 queries
I'm also not liking the death-grey color scheme. Where's the eye-candy Apple!
AND - I can't watch the WWDC keynote for whatever reason in Safari (or any other browser for that matter)!
The only things I'm noticing that bug me are how slow the interface can be at times and it's nowhere near 2 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 on my system. On my system, IE 7 is faster than Firefox, Opera and now Safari (I'm keeping in mind they're final and this is "beta"
Besides the above it's alright, but nothing to brag about.
EDIT: Yahoo renders all kinds of crazy right now
Works great on my girlfriend's laptop running XP Pro.
Other then its advertised speed, I personally really don't see a need for it. I'm perfectly happy with Firefox, which offers a lot more functionality then this. Not only extensions, but themes as well. The bright blue scrollbars and elements are pretty ugly here on Windows, and the rest of the theme aint so great either. Firefox gives me more control over cookies then this, I prefer to make everything except certain sites a session cookie to be auto dumped on close. It scrolls really slowly for some reason. I can have any search engines I want in the search box in Firefox and not only Google and Yahoo. What else, uh, couple more things I can't think of now. Overall, not bad, but no Firefox thats for sure.
Initial impressions: Renders fine till now, feels fast.
Complaints: text too antialiased, very little customizability (I want the tab bar to be always open), UI font color should be lighter than background, makes a bit hard to read.
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