Apple: Safari 3 Windows Version Launches (and here’s your API into the iPhone)

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.madmedia.ca/articl.....ll-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.imageshack.us/im.....ariqi2.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.webstandards.org/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!

Google Reader doesn’t work in Safari 3.0 for Windows

Phillip,

I never said Safari isn’t standards compliant, nor did I imply that it was a bad browser.

The market reality is that IE has an overwhelming majority of users and, for all its warts, will always be the first target for web developers. In a world where cross-browser compatibility was already hard enough, Apple did us no favors by adding another major rendering engine.

Don’t you think the world would be a better place if Apple had gone with Gecko instead? We’d have standards-compliance and virtually identical behavior across the two major non-IE browsers.

Tyler

Certainly the best looking app. in windows and finally a windows browser that displays type somewhat nicely.

Tyler,
The point of Web Standards is not to only have one rendering engine! If you truly believe that, then you do not fully grasp the meaning of Web Standards. I mean no disrespect when I say this, but your comment has got to be the dumbest suggestion I’ve ever heard of. (Especially since Safari WebKit is much faster than Gecko)

If you truly design your JavaScript/HTML/CSS to be standards compliant, it will work fine in Firefox and in Safari. Period, end of story.

There’s virtually no extra work. Standards are a good thing if you want to support multiple browsers.

Tyler, IE does have the lion’s share of the market. Now imagine if 25% if Windows IE users buy an iPhone and use that to surf the net via WiFi 25% of the time. That increases the Safari market share significantly. So Safari will have to become a target of web developers in the near future. My thinking is that the WiFi component is the most underestimated aspect of the iPhone. In fact just give me a widescreen iPod with Wifi, and I will be happy. To hell with the cell phone capabilities.

This is pretty cool so far. I have it installed on XP, on a machine laden with corporate security crap, and it seems pretty snappy. We run the whole company off of web aps (and MicroSloppy Off), and it has run every web ap and collaboration as well as IE7 or FF, except for one (out of a lot). Well, it’s a beta, so I’ll look forward to seeing the progress. If the do this right, it could continue their ongoing counter attack.

I was hoping to hear about the ZFS implementation, or if it was for real at least.

Itunes has really become the trojan horse of Apple, first it obliged to install quicktime and now is doing the very same thing with safari.. (be it optional or not)

but what i am bothered with Steve Jobs having the nerve, even in PR mode to say that Safari is the most innovative and advanced Browser??????

Not in a million years.. and the little thing he failed to mention about those bechmarks is that they were done in clean xp installs, and not even demoed in vista, because ie7 in vista is faster than in xp, and because Safari has a overload of cache with just 15 minutes of use, i would have liked to see a 1hr bechmark, and then see who won from ie7 (even in Xp) and Safari….i got the answer since i just tested it in 3 computers.. the winner by a longshot is IE7….

Yeah, you gotta show love for those those “dirty” xp installs.

Love the comments from Tyler and Andre. Funny stuff.

Personally I develop for Mozilla/Safari first and once that is working I see what IE is messing up that I have to account for. Anybody that does it the other way around I believe is causing a lot of unnecessary stress for themselves.

Also remember Apple released this as a beta and despite the overwhelming amount of web 2.0 sites declaring that they are beta Apple just might still have that term in regard to what it used to mean for desktop applications. Give them time folks.

…pretty neat. works fine on XP but doesnt come close to the user experience of firefox.

Philip, I’m impressed. You’ve managed to misread or misrepresent both my posts, but you did find time to throw in personal attacks in your responses. Forgive me for not feeling motivated to engage you further.

I concede the point to you. Safari is the perfect browser. Every single release has been fully standards-compliant. No release has ever had display bugs or required CSS hacks. It has always supported XMLHttpRequest. Since the dawn of time, no web developer has ever written a web page that failed to work in Safari exactly as intended. Really. It’s the Chuck Norris of web browsers.

Tyler,
I’m not sure I see how I misrepresented you. You’re the one that seems to think that less browsers are better for the world. Are you aware that there are more than 4 browsers in the world?

I’m the one who believes that there should be many browsers that all follow the same rules. And if you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of people who feel that way.

No one ever said that Safari was perfect. But, it’s currently the farthest along of any browser of supporting Web Standards.

Make fun of it all you want. But, if you don’t know how to design standards-compliant websites, you’re just going to fall behind the curve.

i tried it.
it is not as fast as apple claims it to be (faster then f.fox??, i think not!)
and it crashes in hebrew sites (beta…)
no reason to use it on a pc, maybe to test safari compliant sites.
apple, u should better concentrate on the Iphone and not on this…

As I mentioned before, this is more about the iPhone. You’re all getting so technical and worked up about a beta version of Safari.

What’s funny is that even apple.com looks like a mess in my install of Safari. I don’t even get any text on the website, only images. As you say, thank God it’s beta - but they seem to have a lot of bugs to fix.

I haven’t installed Safari yet, I do not want to spoil my stable Windows with rubbish. How dare Apple is. I bet it cannot be faster than Opera or Firefox. It must be a joke. Please, test Safari’s JS engine with this page and tell us your findings.
http://w3net.eu/code/privateMembers/

It’s a US-only beta, I guess. On Windows versions for other countries it just screws up! Bold and italic disappear and all sorts of weird things happen!!!
The JS engine seems to works perfectly, anyway… so it’s decent to use it for Ajax testing.

This keeps happening to a lot of people:
http://home.earthlink.net/~hct.....ked_up.jpg

There is a post over here about the fonts not working:
http://discussions.apple.com/t.....;tstart=15

There are several fixes to the font thing, but this is one that seems to work most of the time:

1. Copy the Lucida Grande font files to the \Windows\Fonts directory.
2. Rename the Safari.resources folder to something else.
3. Try to start Safari, get an error message, and dismiss the message.
4. Name Safari.resources back to its original name.
5. Start Safari.

I feel bad for Apple. This is bad all around.

Safari 3 beta doesn´t work even on a mac

I gave Safari on Windows a spin and it seems more or less OK, but I found that I just couldn’t live without Adblock Plus. (I googled around a bit, but the only thing that appears to be close, PithHelmet, is OS X only.)

There have been a bunch of reports of Safari 3 for Windows not picking up the OS fonts correctly. So, it just displays lines where it can’t display the font. Not sure what that’s all about.

It’s probably a little too beta for most people.

As big of a fan as I am for Apple applications for Windows, Apple is really going to have to debug this one. Using it for 10 minutes, the system memory that it took up exceeded 300 MB! Sorry Apple, back to Firefox. And why not open it up to developers for extensions like Firefox provides?

Keep in mind that Safari’s WebKit is Open Source. You can develop all of the “Netscape Style” plugins you want:

http://developer.apple.com/int.....l#anchor11

While Safari doesn’t support “Firefox Extensions,” you can actually build any application you want with WebKit. You could build your own custom browser with WebKit if you wanted to.

For instance, iTunes is an example of Apple’s WebKit in an application. iTunes is basically just a custom WebKit browser.

Also, the Widget layer on OS X is just another form of WebKit. (Which makes me wonder if Apple will create a WebKit Widget-layer for Windows, following the new W3C Widget standard, hopefully).

Anyway, I think you’ll find that Safari WebKit is rather developer friendly:

http://developer.apple.com/doc.....ebContent/

hi all,
I installed safari on windows xp sp2 it is not running what is the problem with that. It is showing only Loading “http://www.apple.com/startpagr” what should i do ?

Wirednews says that safari is slower than IE and firefox on this link - http://blog.wired.com/monkeybi....._benc.html

I know safari windows is still in beta, but nevertheless this benchmark is interesting.

I also don’t see any excitement in AJAX apps for iPhone, already guessed that we will be able to run the webapps as it has a webbrowser. I think their latest announcment just means that safari on iphone supports AJAX. Anyway will be waiting for the day when Apple intros some read SDK to write native iPhone applications.

Safari works just fine in XP sp2, loads even faster than Opera.
If you poke about a bit, there’s come common bits with Mozilla, so now lets
have some adapted Firefox extensions! (Yes, the speed is partly because there are few extensions right now…)