Nothing earth shattering coming out of the Apple WWDC conference today in San Francisco. One interesting tidbit, though: Apple is releasing a version of their Safari browser for Windows machines. Safari 3 is available now as a free download for Mac OS X, Windows XP and Windows Vista.
This is a big move for Apple, which now provides iTunes and Safari for the Windows platform. Microsoft stopped developing its IE browser for the Mac platform in 2003. Today, Firefox and Safari are both popular choices for browsers on the Mac platform. Steve Jobs claims 5% market share for Safari across all operating systems, and says it is twice as fast as the competition.
Apple is also “opening” up the iPhone to third party applications…via Safari.
To me the most significant thing was around the iphone.
Specifically, a safari browser with extensions to make it easy to access iphone features (like dialing). The whole model for writing iphone apps is just the web model, no fancy sdks or runtimes or libs or java or junk.
Great.. Another browser to test.
I don’t think Appl ewill make much headway here. I think its more likely they released this so Windows developers (the majority out there), test websites they make so that they work better on iPhone and Mac.
This just is an attempt to encourage development for iPhone and Safari, not really an “offering” to the Windows community.
Nice for testing for Safari from Windows, cool.
I’m with Andre here.
Apple did a major disservice to the web development community by adopting an alternative rendering engine for Safari. The choice has caused millions of man-hours lost of additional browser compatibility testing. It also impacted their customer base since Safari is the last browser developers test against – ensuring lots of broken layouts for their users. I’m a moderate Apple enthusiast (love the iPod, hate MacOS X) but they’d gain a lot of standing in my book if they aborted this browser (or, better yet, decided to share a rendering engine with Mozilla).
Interesting. Actually that’s something that I definitely didn’t expect from Apple. It’s funny how iPod + iTunes was Mac-only for a while, then it became available for Windows users, too. Same with Safari.
I don’t know how many people will change, though. :/ I might try it out, but I like my Firefox.
I just went to this site in Safari3 (Windows) and the page crashed the brower. Woah.
Also, all the links with the SNAP preview appear to be invisible. The small bubble displays, but the link text before the bubble is really invisible – doesn’t even show up when you select it.
Good that there is another browser we need to implement quirks for.
growing twice as fast as the competition is ; not hard at 5% /
– heh when youo 70-80% (IE) isnt that impossible? (atleast not probable)
-RB
a) Safari is a mess on my XP installation – all the encoding is wrong so I get strings like “asdflaksjdf” instead of “View menu” and so on.
b) Saying this is an API into the iPhone? Weak, very weak.
Nobody seems to be reporting on how the iPhone isn’t supporting IM yet – no MMS.
I thought that the iChat interface was IM for the iPhone. iChat is AIM anyway, right?
I think the big news is really that when everyone was excepting a big Apple-Google deal, you have this cool safari announcement which looks more like a huge ad for Yahoo!.
So Steve is it Yahoo! or Google?
It’s also a smart thing to do with the iPhone coming out. Alot of folks who will get the iPhone may be new to Safari. This way they get a couple of days to get used to Safari before iPhone comes out.
@#9 Chris: I heard iChat will go Jabber.
At first glance, journalists will laugh – because they will think that Apple is trying to displace Explorer with Safari. However, this is a strategic move to integrate the iphone on windows.
Plus, Jobs has been waiting 20 years to get back at Bill for stealing the GUI.
I was very exited about safari for windows until I installed it on my Vista box. Right out of the gate, with only two tabs open, safari was eating up 180megs or memory and was dog slow. I know this is a beta, but I hope they iron this out before the final version.
till – that is interesting. I’d like to see Adium for the iPhone so I can be logged in to multiple IM accounts at once. As it is, I am forced to pick 1 at a time on OZ on my Blackberry.
“We’ve heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true. “
i tested websites on random websites and it is full of bugs, with random typography, random white spaces. it breaks the designs, hides texts. it works only for basic websites, with no css.
I think apple meant to say twice as slow and twice as fast. And the fonts look terrible, they must be doing something weird with the cleartype font technology.
works fine for me…
i posted some screenshots of websites here:
http://heri.mad...ws-full-of-bugs
basically, it’s a joke. even ie5.5 was better
@heri – All those sites look fine on my Safari for Windows install
I don’t believe Safari for Windows will be a as widely adopted as Firefox or even Opera… The windows browser market is already crowned.
I tested this beta on Windows on a vBulletin forum and I got lots of invisible text (which I can click but it’s not displayed)… I hope they get it working just like in Mac so that I can test the websites I develop more easily.
Another reason they’ve done this Saafari for Windows thing is bookmark synching. They’ve got that listed as a feature on the iPhone page, makes sense as typing urls on a phone can be a real pain, and putting Safari on Windows is a way to do it without Apple having to worry about even mentioning other browsers.
As for this being some great new leap in opening up 3rd party development for the iPhone, Im not overly impressed. Its a start I suppose, would be better if there was some offline browser storage support ala google gears though.
Browsing this on Safari for XP just now. No major problems. The only thing that strikes me is that it is slow compared to Firefox…which goes against their claims.
I installed safari as soon as the new apple site went live. I’ve been hoping around the net. I have yet to have a problem. I haven’t experienced any of the slowdown that anyone has mentioned. In fact, safari is noticeably faster than either firefox or IE.
I do miss some firefox features like spellcheck and my middle mouse button doesn’t let me scroll, but all in all I am very pleased to finally have a khtml based browser for windows.
Hey, it’s Beta. It works pretty fast on my XP. I’ve crashed it twice, but…did I mention it’s Beta?
Seems more like an Alpha version to me (I guess they wanted to release it by today’s keynote): No import of bookmarks etc at the beginning, a crash when I hit the “add bookmark folder” menu item, strange layout for many web pages (incuding those that should be working with the original Safari browser, like heise.de, Germany’s most important IT site, spiegel.de, the largest German news site) … but no crash on Techcrunch.com
And why do I have to mark the whole address in the addres bar if I want to type in a new URL and can’t just click on it as it is standard in any other browser?
Safari for XP is slow slow slow. What a joke.
Trying to surf on safari now and I can’t even type a url in. Only images show up, no text. Quite weird (running vista) — may try a restart if I feel like messing with it.
People should be prepared to test more against Safari. If the iPhone is widely adopted (i.e iPod-like numbers), and if people use its wifi (or cell) to access the web frequently, then you may have a lot more visitors to your site using Safari.
What with Google Gears, Apollo AIR and Apple Safari, I was beginning to worry a little as a Microsoft ASP.NET developer! But I’m reassured by some of the comments! Safari won’t overtake Firefox. Safari isn’t a true development platform on the slowish connection speed of an iPhone. And whilst the competition rush out technologies, Microsoft can quietly get the mix right with Vista, Silverlight and ASP.NET AJAX Extensions!
App development through Safari? Oh come on…. Give me a break.
So much for 3rd party IM clients or any kind of honestly USEFUL software that can integrate with the system. How limiting can you get? Apparently Apple is too afraid to allow the devs out there to actually do anything powerful with the iPhone. So you’ll be able to make some glorified web pages.. Big whoop de doo. This is the biggest slap in the face to iPhone developers.
iPhone = big shiny fancy expensive peice toy that does less than everything else on the market for tons more money. Explain to me why I want this thing please.
Sure iPhone looks awesome in their use case commercials where the only things the people in the commercials want to do is look up calimari restaurants.
I’d like to see the same iPhone “look how easy it is” commercial with someone who needs to view a PDF, Word Doc, or send an IM via AIM or something… I think i just heard the record scratch sound….
Great. Do I need a 3rd browser? Nope. But hey love the desktop icon!
Personally I like Firefox better anyone but I think that this has more to do with cross-platform iPhone users than anything else. Also it opens up the audience for Safari specific apps a bit which is also good for the iPhone. As for Safari as the iPhone “API” – how very Web 2.0 of them but it would make more sense if the thing was 3G out of the gate.
It’s an interesting compromise but goes against what Jobs said about the advantages of rich clients vs web-based apps at last week’s D: Conference.
I’ve installed Safari on one of our Vista (Ultimate Business) boxes. I’ts running fine, everything looks correct, and I’m posting this comment using it. No crashes yet Don’[t know if I’ll replace Firefox, or IE7, but it runs and looks pretty much the same on this box as on my mac.
The only browser unable to correctly display a google result page…
Wow.
I installed Safari, and every single time I attempt to bookmark something it crashes–hard. I posted on Apple’s board, and others seem to be having problems, too.
It is gorgeous and super fast…seemingly faster than Firefox.
I couldn’t even install it on my vista. It crashed out during the install. What a joke. I am with the rest of the people here. Safari just adds a lot of work for us . It’s more work to get all the Web2.0/AJAX stuff to work on it and now we are forced to test on more browsers.
Web developers should ban Safari development until it behaves identical (css and javascript) to FF.
Apple is trying to do too much, they should drop Safari and build on FF and focus on launching their next OS on time.
I think this was a wrong move and it’s going to hurt Iphone application growth.
Anyone else been able to get safari working on Vista Ultimate 64-bit machine? I have tried and it doesn’t work on my machine. I’m wondering if anyone else is having the same problem.
Thanks
For those guys slapping Safari in general (Safari34win can be bogus of course) :
Safari isn’t another browser. It’s based on KHTML, already used on nokia smart phones and Linux (KDE) desktops.
It uses the currently only fully css-compatible (see: acid 2.0 test) rendering engine, and it’s a fairly new and clean code: you could get a trip to the gecko/mozilla sourcecode to tell what a 10-year-old looks like.
Ok, Firefox is more popular, but TRUST me it’s more buggy, even if pages are optimized for that
(A web developer / lead engineer of startup http://jo-hely.hu who used KHTML since 2005, and have fighting with netscape (4.x) bugs since 1998 or so)
I installed it on my xp and I am getting lots of error and its crashing.
It sucks! i just installed it, although works fine without crashing my XP, webpages are not displaying as it should. try google even, the fonts look like graffiti style fonts!
Here’s a screenshot
http://img355.i...5/safariqi2.gif
Another thought, on iPhone “API”:
iPhone was born to sell 3G for the masses. It couldn’t be done such clean with offline applications, not to mean cracking, warez, etc which happens all the time with J2ME. With this solution, you could make a paid application without fear for warez and cracking, and users will have to use their 3G / EDGE connection, so it’s a great deal for Cingular/AT&T
I can’t wait to get an iPhone.
Tyler and Andre, you have no idea what you are talking about. Safari is a “standards-based browser” which means it renders CSS2/3 the way the W3C intended. It follows standards-based JavaScript as well (ECMAScript).
Internet Explorer is notorious for getting the W3C standards wrong. (If you know enough about web layouts, you’ll know that Microsoft is the one that has cost the web developer community countless of lost hours in development).
Take for instance the Acid2 test. Safari and Opera are the only browsers that get it right at this point. Try it and see for yourself:
http://www.webs...g/action/acid2/
(Firefox 3.0 is now passing Acid2)
So, if you know how to design according to Web Standards (A la CSS Zen Garden, for instance), you’ll have no problem designing pages that work perfectly in Safari. My guess is that you’re not aware of W3C Web Standards. Otherwise, you would have known…
In my experience a layout that works in one of Firefox, Safari, or Opera works in all of them in most cases. The “extra testing” is extremely minimal.
IE is another story, of course.
I would love to see Adium for Windows!