Safari for Windows - First Impressions

June 11, 2007 7:14 PM Comments [68] Posted in Musings | Reviews

imageHell has frozen over and I'm running Safari on Windows (v3 Public Beta) You can download it at: www.apple.com/safari.

Good Things:

Weird Things:

  • Dialog Boxes show up as additional Application Windows in the Explorer bar. Meaning, if you have the Preferences Dialog open, the Taskbar says you're running two Safari Windows.
  • The installer asks to install the Bonjour Service, Apple's service discovery protocol ala UPnP. I declined.
  • It uses its own Font Smoothing system with three options, light, medium and strong. It's not using ClearType, and they appear to have their own embedded fonts for rendering text within the browser.
  • It looks like a Mac Application on Windows. Not bad, but slightly creepy.
  • This blog's comment box renders strangely, possibly because they allow you to resize text boxes yourself. It obscures the new Live Comment Preview.
  • What's the point? Was this browser needed?
  • As with OS X apps, you can only resize the window with the handle in the lower right corner.

Speculation:

  • They've clearly built some amazing owner-draw cross-platform UI framework here. Perhaps Safari was the proving ground? Well, they've proven it. I wonder if the Apple concept of a "Universal Binary" has more draconian world dominationesque connotations? Perhaps Objective C is the new Java? Write once, debug everywhere.

Either way, I encourage you to download Safari and try it out. I'm not switching away from Firefox2 just yet, but speed is the #1 thing that'll make me switch. We will see.

Comments [68]
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Monday, June 11, 2007 7:33:23 PM UTC
Blazing fast, Mac or Windows. My immediate default browser on either platform.
Dave Murdock
Monday, June 11, 2007 7:37:51 PM UTC
Well. Its just bad that I can't get it to work om my boxes. A MacBook running Vista, and my standard PC running vista.

Frequest crashes, and all sites (Except apple.com, offcause :P) renders wrong. Including http://asp.net, http://www.nytimes.com/, and even this blog! Alot of text is missing. We are not talking about HTML erros here, or just minor thing going wrong - theese sites are useless. I quess its a bad seed posted from the apple tree. I quess they will come up with a patch without even telling sometime (Could be bad reputation for the apple tree, that it has bad seeds), but until that, im staying with IE or Firefox or even telnet for that matter - works better right now.

Well, when this is going to work although, it will be great to see a new browser player on the market, Firefox is for the nerds, and IE is just boring, so why not the browser that looks like ITunes? I whould certainly consider changing if my Visual Studio will play well, and they fix this bug. I whould even consider uninstalling IE - I just need to find the uninstall.exe - looked for hours and hours...

But until that moment: Apple admit you have bad seeds - like anybody else, and give me a fix, or will eat the rest of the apples in my basket - I've warned you!
Jesper Blad Jensen
Monday, June 11, 2007 7:48:59 PM UTC
Jesper, I would try an uninstall and reinstall, I didn't have a problem installing on Windows Server 2003 SP1
Dave Murdock
Monday, June 11, 2007 7:49:30 PM UTC
Browser competition is good.

What's the point? I'm betting it has to do with familiarity and the iPhone.

Only bugs I've found so far... crashes on Windows authentication sites, back button on mouse doesn't work, font smoothing is wonky and as I type this comment the name/email/home page boxes above are jiggling back and forth a few pixels.
John S.
Monday, June 11, 2007 7:58:30 PM UTC
Fast, ok. But it looks like crap - awful UI, miserable text rendering. And I tried for a few minutes to figure out how to resize the window before I gave up. :)

I'll stick with Firefox.
Marc Bernard
Monday, June 11, 2007 8:01:07 PM UTC
Dave Murdock: Reinstall don't help. I've tried to install it on Windows Server 2003 SP2, and there it works perfect. This is not a issolated insident, it is the same on both my machines, so maybe its a OS issue, or a language issue (running danish windows).

I have reported it, so now its waiting time :)
Jesper Blad Jensen
Monday, June 11, 2007 8:02:37 PM UTC
Take a look in the Safari program files folder.... CoreFoundation.dll, CoreGraphics.dll. Looks like Cocoa to me.

I'm guessing that just like there was a secret project that kept NeXT for x86 running and updated, I'm guessing there's a secret project keeping Yellow Box for Windows running and updated...
Colin
Monday, June 11, 2007 8:08:21 PM UTC
Hmm, I worked on a project from 1993 to 2000 that was Objective C based. While I liked it better than C++ for object-oriented programming back then, today I vastly prefer either Java or C#. Personally I think that Objective C is an albatross for MAC OS X programmers. Seriously, how much language innovation is going on in the ObjC space? In fact, there was a point around 1996/97 that I thought the language was dead. Our compiler vendor, Stepstone, was no longer returning our phone calls. Fortunately we had bought the source to the compiler from them and have been able to update it over the years to handle all the "oddities" in the MS C compiler (which we use to compile the converted .m -> .c files) such as __int64 and unnamed unions within structs. No thanks, I wasted far too much time patching that compiler to keep it working with modern technology. Give me a modern language with all the modern comforts, thank you very much.
Keith Hill
Monday, June 11, 2007 8:09:04 PM UTC
Colin: Good call looking at Program Files. Very interesting...

Marc Bernard: Running it on Vista?
Dave Murdock
Monday, June 11, 2007 8:09:43 PM UTC
Jesper Blad Jensen: You have to restart Windows after installing. It's working great for me.
steve
Monday, June 11, 2007 8:25:10 PM UTC
Steve: Thanks for tip, but it did not work. :(

So if you use Vista, then we can rule out the OS problem, and then it must be my OS Language, or something else that my computers share.
Jesper Blad Jensen
Monday, June 11, 2007 8:30:14 PM UTC
Three main reasons for Safari on Windows:

1) Browser compatibility. Many popular sites (including banks, Scott :) don't support Safari well. It doesn't have much market share, but more importantly, testing Safari has up until this point required access to a Mac. With a Windows version, now the majority of Web developers have the ability to test their web sites for Safari. A better Web experience for Mac users is the result.

2) iTunes has been a good way for Apple to evangelize "The Apple Way" to Windows users. Safari is another opportunity to potentially hook Windows users and get them to switch.

3) Safari (and AJAX/Web 2.0) is the development story for the iPhone. There will (probably) be more iPhones out there than there are Macs or Mac developers. They want to enable developers running Windows to build iPhone-savvy web apps.

I don't buy the speculation about cross platform app frameworks, Objective C as the new Java, etc. I believe that would eventually lead to marginalizing the Mac OS platform.

(I'm at WWDC, by the way... whee!)
Jason Mauer
Monday, June 11, 2007 8:34:13 PM UTC
Jason: I don't think Apple will ever release a Public Cocoa for Windows framework, but they may in fact be keeping on running in house just so they can port apps like this over as it becomes strategic.
Dave Murdock
Monday, June 11, 2007 8:34:43 PM UTC
Jason - Good points! For the record, our software and banks support Safari (when Safari allows us to...)
Scott Hanselman
Monday, June 11, 2007 8:44:53 PM UTC
Now that Adobe is doing Apollo (aka AIR) with a built-in WebKit-based browser, everyone who uses it is going to need to make sure their web apps work in WebKit/AIR/Safari anyway....
Oran
Monday, June 11, 2007 8:48:22 PM UTC
No displayed text for me when testing (menu's, toolbars, address bar, etc...). One of many reported over at the comments on Lifehacker. Using Win XP Pro.

One thing that no one else has mentioned (that I have seen at least) - if Apple makes Safari work on Windows then there is NO reason why projects like Swift shouldn't be able to build off that to give us a good clean WebKit based browser on Windows (ala Shiira on Mac OS X).

--
Kevin
http://technogeek.org/
Kevin
Monday, June 11, 2007 8:58:06 PM UTC
Are all Mac applications like this (no tooltips)?

If so, where's the discoverability?

If Scott hadn't told me what the little bug/ant/whatever button on the toolbar was supposed to do I would have no idea.

TITLE attributes on HTML tags don't get displayed (in either the status bar or tool tips) either.

Maybe it's just broken on my PC, but I find it really frustrating not having any tooltips available.

Definitely won't be my first choice for browsing on a PC, but I will definitely use it for testing.
Grant Wagner
Monday, June 11, 2007 9:09:30 PM UTC
I'm getting no text in the browser as well, running on Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. The whole application is just icons but no text... anywhere.
Drew Burden
Monday, June 11, 2007 9:20:09 PM UTC
I'm interested in the focus on speed here. In my experience, rendering speed is almost always within the standard devation of download time (which includes server generation time for dynamic content) over some reasonable set of page refreshes. Even if you reduced rendering speed incredibly, download time dominates. Do you have a different experience? What pages render "slowly" to you?
Mark
Monday, June 11, 2007 9:24:24 PM UTC
maybe they are just beta testing their windows cocoa framework with safari, so they can bring some kind of iLife for Windows out!
gyurisc
Monday, June 11, 2007 9:24:57 PM UTC
CPU usage is abysmal. Speed is good.

LOTS of issues relating to non-native UI controls, cleartype, etc. I don't like apps that don't even try to follow the Windows guidelines. Then again, I think Apple just wants to attract more people to the Mac with fancy UIs.

I still like it though, I'll play around some more...
Mike Weller
Monday, June 11, 2007 9:26:20 PM UTC
Mark...I totally hear you and understand what you're saying. All I can guess is that rendering typically takes a full second or two and they've got that down to <.25s...and it FEELS fast. It may also be perception of speed because they get SOMETHING on the screen fast, then progressively bring in the rest.
Scott Hanselman
Monday, June 11, 2007 9:45:33 PM UTC
.Net on a Mac, Safari on Windows, what a wonderful modern age we live in, I think :S
OmegaSupreme
Monday, June 11, 2007 10:03:06 PM UTC
Objective-C is far from dead and better (in my opinion) than .NET and Java. I've used Java for 2 years, and I .NET on daily basis. There are lots of things that help writting applications in Obj-C that you have to do in .NET by yourself. Bindings (auto UI refresh), CoreData. Writting a full featured application in Obj-C (with Cocoa) is several times faster than C#. Funny thing is: everyone's using it. The same was with C++, which was (and still is) worse than Obj-C. To many stupid functionalities which were tossed when "modern" languages emerged (Java and C#). Obj-C is closer to C# than C++ was. And Obj-C didn't change that much. All they added during those years was categories and garbage collection. Sadly... Safari isn't probably written in Obj-C.
Chris
Monday, June 11, 2007 10:16:20 PM UTC
Yes, Safari for Windows does look cool, and it feels faster just maybe just b/c Steve Jobs said it. :) But, even tho' Google and Apple are supposedly cooperating, I still can't do Gmail Chat in Safari - so I wind up having to still use IE or Firefox, eh?
djchuang
Monday, June 11, 2007 10:21:05 PM UTC
This is great for browser testing. I really like the bug button. I had problems logging into an intranet application with Windows auth, and I got a random crash, but otherwise this is great. Not a chance I'd use it as a default browser, but awesome for testing.
Jon Galloway
Monday, June 11, 2007 10:21:50 PM UTC
Think of it as an SDK for the iPhone. This allows you to build asp.net (or whatever) based apps that target the iPhone. Once they add a GPS locator to it and start publishing your location as an HTTP header with every request, we'll start to undergo the web 3.0 revolution.
shawn
Monday, June 11, 2007 10:41:36 PM UTC
Runs slower than ie7 on my system. I'm about 25-33% slower than ie7 on the pentium 4 3.0ghz hyper-threaded machine that i work on at work. So maybe it's heavily optimized for multi-core cpu's.
Darren Kopp
Monday, June 11, 2007 11:15:05 PM UTC
Right click "SafariSetup.exe" > Properties > Version > Company.

Who is Igor Pavlov?
foobar
Monday, June 11, 2007 11:17:22 PM UTC
Hm...that's a pretty common name. I wonder if it's the developer of 7-ZIP? That wouldn't make much sense. Probably just and Apple Dev.
Scott Hanselman
Monday, June 11, 2007 11:18:19 PM UTC
The reason I have FF2 on my system is it's extensions. I suspect that is the cause with many other power users and developers. I haven't seen the same quantity nor quality in the Safari plugins yet. Hopefully the windows port can help change this situation.
Sergio Pereira
Monday, June 11, 2007 11:26:15 PM UTC
"Seriously, how much language innovation is going on in the ObjC space?"

Check out the Leopard page at Apple.com, they have a section for Developers there that outline some of the things coming in ObjC 2.0. The changes are going to make life easier for a lot of Mac devs. So much so that they next version of VooDoo Pad, Delicious Library, and TextMate are going to be Leopard only.

Safari 3.0/this blogs theme bug: Live Preview ends up overlapping the grey area at the bottom on my iBook. I don't recall seeing that with Safari 2.0. Sent in the bug report. The OS X version of Safari 3.0 doesn't have the "Bug" icon" It ends up under the "Safari" menu as "report bug to Apple"
Scott
Tuesday, June 12, 2007 12:56:39 AM UTC
"...There's a "submit bug" button built right in with options to send the source of the page as well as a screenshot. Classy..."

I agree -- this is something that would be great to include in our own code especially new applications or ones in UAT / Beta mode. Has anyone implemented something similiar to this but instead of it being in a desktop application implemented directly on the website itself ?
Jacque
Tuesday, June 12, 2007 1:05:33 AM UTC
"...There's a "submit bug" button built right in with options to send the source of the page as well as a screenshot. Classy..."

I've noticed the Netscape Navigator 9.0b1 has the bug button right up front too. Handy indeed.
Chris
Tuesday, June 12, 2007 5:44:02 AM UTC
Great. This mean I can have the same browser on my Mac, my window pc and my forth coming iPhone. :)

As a power user speed is all there is..
Morten
Tuesday, June 12, 2007 5:58:26 AM UTC
It doesn't seem to like multiple monitors on XP either (haven't tried Vista). Try moving Safari on to your non-primary monitor, then either double-click the title bar or click the maximize button. If your setup is anything like mine, Safari will just disappear into the ether, leaving a lonely task-bar button behind that does nothing.

It maximizes fine on the primary monitor though.
Sam
Tuesday, June 12, 2007 6:24:30 AM UTC
>> Objective-C is far from dead

If you define "far from dead" as "on life support" well then OK. I guess you're right. However when I stroll through the local Barne & Noble I sure don't see many recently released books on Objective C as compared to C#, Java, Python and Ruby. I definitely grant you that Objective C was preferrable to C++ back in the day because it was easier to build OO systems in ObjC but I sorely missed static type safety. The version of the Stepstone tools we used essentially defined id to void* so you could happily send messages to objects that didn't implement that message and BAM - you get a nice runtime error that object foo doesNotRecognize message 'bark'. I really hated that aspect of the messaging approach. As for the dynamism of ObjC that is outdone quite a bit by languages like Python and Ruby IMO.
Keith Hill
Tuesday, June 12, 2007 6:54:06 AM UTC
There's a "submit bug" button built right in with options to send the source of the page as well as a screenshot. Classy.

I say it's brilliant. More applications should have the shiny button with a picture of an insect. Even the most mature horizontal market applications should have this button.
Burton
Tuesday, June 12, 2007 7:19:59 AM UTC
I know the the drop-down menus on my web site do not work properly for Safari on the Mac (time well spent at the Apple store), so I was happy that I had now had a system to test with... but, unfortunately, my web site looks fine using Safari for Windows.

Different rendering engine?
Tony Alderman
Tuesday, June 12, 2007 8:59:17 AM UTC
Did anyone get Java to work with this Safari beta on Windows? Under XP Pro SP2, with Java 6 update 1 already on the machine, I didn't. And reinstalling Java (from the Apple Safari Plugins download page) did not help, nor did rebooting. Meanwhile Java works fine in all the other browsers.

In Plugins Installed it shows Apple Java Plugin with one line table.

Real Audio plugins (although multiply listed in the Plugins Installed page) do not kick in, either - the browser download the .ram file (even the short streaming one). Meanwhile, Adobe Reader, Flash and Windows Media plugins all work without the need for a download.

And I get a reproducible Application not Responding whever clicking 2nd time on the bookmarks
bar's bookmarks icon, while on the java applet's webpage. Meaning, clicking bookmarks icon once
displays bookmarks, then clicking on it return the java applet's web page, but then the click on the
bookmarks icon makes Safari unpresonsive.

It also mistakenly thinks in its preferences/general that Firefox is my default browser, while the default one is SeaMonkey. Resetting this does not persist - on browser restart it's back to Firefox. Meanwhile SeaMonkey remains the default browser with no ill effects.

Other than that the build 522.3.11 Safari 3.0 beta seems to work well.
ML
Tuesday, June 12, 2007 10:13:43 AM UTC
Teleriks Silverlight demo loads on Vista with Safari but it is definitely not working properly. For some reason it only refreshes when I scroll the animation out of the windows view and back again. I wonder how good Safari on Windows will be for testing Silverlight for the Mac? I guess we'll have to wait and see.
As for Safari, I don't know about the speed but there are some pretty simple features that are yet to be included in any browser.

1) Download location "favourites". A list of download locations that you use often. I'm sick of always having to manually choose Desktop, My Documents, C:\Downloads whenever I need to change the location of my downloads. These could also be associated with a file type as well.

2) The ability to group several tabs into a "project" which can be collapsed out of sight. Much like multiple desktops on Linux. This would include the ability to move tabs between tab groups. I would also like to be able to create a bookmark link to the tab group. This would mean that if I was going to learn Silverlight I could create a windows folder called "Learn Silverlight", put a link to the tab group in it and then put all my relevant links in that tab group. Then I can move tabs in and out of the group as I find and consume information on Silverlight.

Working in the browser then become much like working in Visual Studio. You have a project file and associated data files. Files can be added and removed as you work.

There is one nice feature I've found in Safari though. You can click an icon next to an item in the downloads window to open its destination folder. Nice!
Jonathan Parker
Tuesday, June 12, 2007 10:17:19 AM UTC
One can only assume that is out for Windows because of the iPhone, and that that we may be seeing iLife 08 for Windows in the near future!
Paul Kerton
Tuesday, June 12, 2007 10:23:40 AM UTC
If Apple starts making its software Windows compatible, then we can just forget Apple hardware and stick with PC's :-)

Also to however commented about checking Safari on PC rather than a MAC is wrong, unless its a perfect direct port, it will render / handle differently on the PC and the MAC, hence why Windows IE and MAC IE produce different errors, they have different coding to work on the two OS's.

Also MAC handle text sizes/fonts differently and untill these two are harmonized, there will always be a potential for an error in display between a PC and a MAC as far as webv apps are concerned.
James
Tuesday, June 12, 2007 10:28:58 AM UTC
My experience with this browser was pitiful; A lot of well-known sites (msnbc, cnn, ...) don't work, their menus are missing and/or are totally useless. I tried to Google something and the browser crashed as I was typing the search expression!

I'm using Vista on a PC, I meant to try it on WinXP VirtualPC but now I won't bother; clearly more work is needed on this.

PS. Did I mention that on the few sites it did work, I saw no performance benefits compared to other browsers?
Panagiotis Poulos
Tuesday, June 12, 2007 10:57:52 AM UTC
Installed it, couldnt get java applets to run - it hung and crashed on the second site I visited. I'm sure it's easy to do but the fact it didn't just do things immediately like IE7 and Firefox put me off straight away. Unlike firefox or IE I can't find the tools menu so I can turn things on and off, it has an irritating habit of not allowing me access to my windows start bar when in full screen. A host of other things in the first half hour made me remove this fairly woeful application. Like most things Apple, I'm sure it works fine on Apples with an Apple OS but for the majority of us that aren't blind fanboys, I'll stick with my dual Firefox/IE7 mix until they develop something that actually works properly on a Windows machine.
Matt Jones
Tuesday, June 12, 2007 11:08:11 AM UTC
The Maximise button doesn't work on a dual screen system if you are using it on screen 2. The application window maximises into a Fictions 3rd window. Wierd. Works ok if you view on window 1.

ukbilko
Tuesday, June 12, 2007 11:14:48 AM UTC
- "What's the point?"

Another reason that hasn't been mentioned above... money.

Apple currently makes $25m/yr from Google (every time a search is performed using the search box at the top, Google gives Apple a cut of their revenue).

It's not hard to see this figure rising to hundreds of millions of dollars if Safari on Windows takes off.
Jack Goodby
Tuesday, June 12, 2007 11:17:56 AM UTC
I rather stick with Firefox 2 cos it easy to type on address bar without being at www.... Mozilla release Fx 3 due in November and new Fx 4 due in October 2008...
Martin
Tuesday, June 12, 2007 11:18:47 AM UTC
Just been trying to find my IE7 bookmarks file for import and after doing a search for "ie7 bookmarks" the top reply was tredosoft.com/node/13 and as soon as I try to go there it crashes safari! Not too good so far.
Julian
Tuesday, June 12, 2007 11:29:24 AM UTC
That's annoying, I have two monitors at home but didn't check the second one's maximisability. I'll have to check that when I get home (I'm on Vista there).

As you type into the address bar you must use the mouse to select a 'suggested' address from the drop-down -- annoying. But aside from that I like it a lot. I vary between Firefox and IE7 as it is, so now maybe between the three.
Gavin Ayling
Tuesday, June 12, 2007 11:38:26 AM UTC
Yes, it's a bit buggy: No title text, won't go through corporate proxy, text is unclear and using XP's "Start with...." feature always opens the home page. It is a Beta so I guess it'll be fixed soon enough.

But there's a major problem if the rendering isn't identical on Windows and Mac - That's what developers need and without it Safari for Windows is just more development overhead to handle. Firefox clearly showed that pleasing the developers gets you market share. So far Safari for Windows misses the mark for me.
Anthony Garrett
Tuesday, June 12, 2007 11:42:14 AM UTC
Scott, you must be running a different Safari from the rest of us. The one Apple gave me is pig-slow (5 seconds+ page load, on 5Mbps broadband!), that is when it succesfully loads the page at all (frequently stalls mid-load). In fact, it's so bad that IE6 has lots its long-held title of 'worst ever Windows browser'. Which is quite an achievement on Apple's part, but probably not the sort of achievement they were hoping for.
David Russell
Tuesday, June 12, 2007 11:44:54 AM UTC
I downloaded Safari Beta 3 for Windows XP on a Pentium III 933MHz with 1 GByte RAM and 8MB ATI mobility radeon video card.

I must say that it is many times slower than Internet Explorer, let alone Mozilla Firefox. Downloading a page was taking ages and scrolling down the page was a nightmare, as the page was jumping 50-100pixels at a time.

I will stay with Firefox.
Nikos Tsarmpopoulos
Tuesday, June 12, 2007 1:32:52 PM UTC
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned how lacking in features Safari is compared to Firefox 2. It's like stepping back in time to a pre-Firefox Mozilla browser only worse.

Given Apple's reputation for aesthetics and UI design i'm surprised how ugly and clunky it is, too. Try "Show all history". Where did my page go! The URL is still in the location bar, but how do I get it back? Oh, click on "Hide Bookmarks" under the Bookmarks menu - that's logical, given that I was actually looking at the history! To top it off Safari then has to reload the page. Sheesh! Give me the Firefox/IE sidebar any day.
Steve R
Tuesday, June 12, 2007 3:10:14 PM UTC
a tesing platform for web developer. now web designer on windows have IE, FX, Opera and Safari to test but web developer on Mac don't have IE.

another thing is an iPhone web app development platform, Steve know how many developer out there on windows box.
loptar
Tuesday, June 12, 2007 3:14:57 PM UTC
I didn't try it yet, but some doubts/questions pop to my mind:

1) Is it faster than Opera? Why people always ignore Opera, in browsers discussions? Opera is way faster than Explorer and Firefox, it has the best Zooming algorithm EVER, it's lighter and contains all "Firefox Extensions" functionalities (developer tools included) by default, it has the Speed Dial startup, it has a built-in voice reader for web pages. And, most important, it has a Commodore 64 CSS override :-)

2) As noted in other comments, designing an application not following the OS UI Guidelines is BAD. If I wanted a MAC UI, I would have bought a MAC...

3) What on earth can assure me that testing my web application on Win/Safari is like testing it on MAC/Safari? It's just not plain reliable...

4) I don't think that many people will switch to Safari, since all the other browsers have the same 100.000 features. Windows Geeks will probably stick to Firefox. The large user-base will stick to Explorer 7 (they will never even know about Safari... except safaris including lions and gazelles). I will just stick to Opera :-)
Filini
Tuesday, June 12, 2007 5:47:52 PM UTC
I definately think that Safari for windows is nice. Now I don't have to track down a Apple computer to test our site on. Maybe someone can answer this, but what the heck is up with how long it takes Safari to load the first time? Also I guess to me I will probably stay to FF2 and IE7, because I know all of the sites I frequent all work on those, and so far seems to perform better. An example of a site that is terrible looking in Safari is www.codezone.com. Well either way I am definately going to keep trying out Safari, and hopefully it will get a lot better as it gets closer to being the final product.
Brandon K.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007 6:07:31 PM UTC
Filini,

If I am reading Safari's site correctly then they are claiming that Safari is faster then Opera.
Brandon K.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007 7:11:21 PM UTC
Beta 3 or Alpha 1?

I tried it on my Windows Vista Ultimate Laptop (German version). Most of the pages had missing characters, even the Google search result page - it crashed two times after clicking on all bookmarks and on a textbox in a html page.

I don't like the font and the fact that you have to guess, what the buttons mean (tooltips needed)

Firefox and IE: I like you more than ever!

Stefan Plattner
Tuesday, June 12, 2007 8:52:18 PM UTC
Have anybody else noticed that the dowload site allowed you to download Safari+QuickTime? Gee, I wonder how long it will be until this switches to Safari+iTunes? Any takers?
Javier Lozano
Wednesday, June 13, 2007 4:27:41 AM UTC
Following up on my comment made on
Tuesday, June 12, 2007 1:59:17 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)

I have Java working correctly on applets here:
http://www.segal.org/java/

Java still does not work here (but works in all other browsers on the same
machine, XP Pro SP2 with latest Java 6u1):
http://www.schubart.net/rc/

ML
ML
Wednesday, June 13, 2007 4:54:56 AM UTC
I downloaded and installed Safari yesterday, on my work computer using XP and home using vista, cannot use on XP, it crashes everytime I close a dialog box, hence I cant get far at all (anyone have any ideas?)

Ill stay with firefox, safari is fast though and I like the similarity with Itunes and all things apple, I do love my ipod
Les
Wednesday, June 13, 2007 12:08:11 PM UTC
Brandon K.

I usually claim that the latest release of my application is 30% faster then the previous one... but "sometimes" my claims are not 100% truthful :P
Filini
Wednesday, June 13, 2007 3:22:41 PM UTC
Filini,

I totally agree with you. It is just funny how the marketing team is claiming their improvements. What is odd and it might just be me, but Safari actually loads full pages slower then IE and is sickening slow when I go to sites that have RSS feeds.
Brandon K.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007 7:40:38 PM UTC
Hi, i've solved the back button problem for Safari beta 3 on windows.

This worked for me and I hope it does for you too.

I've always used the navigation buttons on my mouse to flick backwards and forwards between pages while browsing in IE. and in safari it doesn't work...

Well, here's how I fixed it.

firstly... i have a media keyboard that uses browsing buttons (forward and back) as well as other functions like a button for media player and email etc... many people have these now.

I also have a programmable mouse. With most 5+ button mice you get a program that you can change the function of the buttons on your mouse. I've got a Razer Mystify Boomslang "Boomer" mouse, and that comes with a good little program to change all the buttons... ANYWAY

I load the program up and tell it i want to change the function of the back button on my mouse and it asks me to press a key, so I press the back navigation key on my keyboard and save the config, and hey presto, it works!!!!!

Then I changed the forward button for the forward button on my keyboard too.

I can't be more specific than this because every mouse uses a different bit of software to program the buttons on it. I used the part of my program that says "assign a key" to the button.

hope you guys have some luck
james
Thursday, June 14, 2007 1:24:12 AM UTC
safari is quite fast compared to ie and ff...i didn't need to install any plugins since apparently it automatically detected the already installed ones for ff. java works fines so does flash..however when testing the wmp plugin, it oddly embeds the old 6.4 wmp and not 9 unlike what firefox does. real and even older plugins like voxware were detected and function alright. the attack on system resources is massive especially if you had 'transparency' on. disabling transparency on safari is a MUST. the ui is a terrible eye-sore.. i wish someone would know a way to disable or change themes.. if you view a source of a page it will open in a regular win api window..which is far better looking and i think it could be the reason for being a resource hog.

it's a good attempt but i think they still have a LOT to do to make it a proper win application... the people at firefox need not to be worried.

tested on: xpee sp2. p4 2.6. 1.5 gb ram. ati radeon 128
betatester1
Thursday, June 14, 2007 2:47:09 AM UTC
the theme bitmaps are inside this file %installpath%\Safari\Safari.resources\en.lproj\SafariResources.dll
upon temporarily renaming it, the browser launched normally but the theme became black(like an alpha)..and normal menus disappeared because the file contains them too..so if anyone into hexing that's the file to play with..just replace the bitmaps inside..ironically without that file, safari became much more memory friendly even with transparency on..so i guess it's the gui that causes most of the trouble. you might also like to reduce the font smoothing to 'light' for lesser resources.

another thing i noticed is the ctrl+scroll wheel doesn't work to resize text..just scrolls the page and for some sites heavily relying on javascripts, some links don't work and the bug button popping becomes inevitable..

the safari speed is far from a hoax..it's actually true..it doesn't just display the page quicker for a speedy effect it handles sites in a different way. a good test for that is the java testing page http://www.java.com/en/download/help/testvm.xml
compare it with ff and ie and you'll notice how fast safari loads the test. it appears that the speed of safari lies in accelerating embedded web-content like flash etc before concerning itself with other things like background images or stylesheets.

despite all its' cons ..it is promising but in my opinion this build is hardly an alpha let alone a beta..i don't think firefox is beatable.

now i'm off to some hacking and unless i remove that stinky blue scroll bar, safari will end up in the trash.
betatester1
Thursday, June 14, 2007 9:56:36 AM UTC
Nope. Can't get Real Player plugin to kick in. This is XP Pro SP2. Windows Safari 3.0 beta simply downloads the file (even the small streaming one). This is after reinstalling Real Player. The other browsers don't have a problem with getting the player to start up. I don't have that problem with other plugins.

Safari also fails to play nice with the embedded <smil> object such as under "24-hour Program Stream"
on the npr.org's page. It just downloads a dmg.php file containing that bit of html code. Other browsers such as Firefox activate the Real Player plugin.

ML
ML
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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer’s view in any way.