Safari for Windows

[Minuteman3]

Ever feel jealous of all the hype surrounding Apple? Well, here's you chance. Apple has made a Windows version of their Safari Internet browser available.

http://www.apple.com/safari/download/

Although I'm pretty much a MS kind of guy ... and have been for a LONG time (anyone remember the IBM PCjr?) ... I went ahead and downloaded it. Can't really see much of a difference on my Vista Business laptop. Loads and displays some pages marginally quicker, but not enough to be a BIG deal. Others don't work as well as IE7. The interface is clean, but I don't particularly like the way bookmarks/favorites are displayed. In other words ... OK. Worth the free download. But certainly NOT earth shaking.

Cheers!!

Ken

 

[barriosa]

I tried it and I thought it was pretty awful. It may be because its a beta version but for now I'm sticking with Firefox

 

[moffo]

Running it as I type -- so far so good...

 

[kirbdog]

I am Excited

As a long time Mac user, this has me excited!
At work I do not have the pleasure of using a Mac, I can not stand the clumsiness of EI, and it looks even worse. So I use Firefox, its a good solid browser with great features and plug-ins but I really do not like the look of it either.

Soon as I fire up me work PC it will get a dose of Mac goodness in the form of Safari. I just exported my bookmarks to my flash drive so everything will be just as I like it when I am ready to use it.

I am hoping it will feel like I am home and not at work, when I use Safari.
Wish me luck with that.

 

[Phil Lee]

I've installed it on my XP laptop and on my work desktop running Vista. Everything worked out of the box in XP but under Vista no text was displayed in Safari. I did a quick google and found a fix so it is now working OK on both PCs.

I'm not sure if I like it enough to switch from Firefox. I don't like the way tabs are handled. There needs to be a way to get links from the bookmark toolbar (which I use all the time) to open in tabs. I also don't like that it shows the full text of the bookmark. This makes for very wide menus for pages with long titles. There also needs to be a toolbar button to open a new tab. Browsing feels slower on my Vista PC than it did under XP (running on a much slower PC). The private browsing works well. It will be useful for using my online banking at work. Another annoyance is that the back keys on my Logitech keyboard and mouse don't work. EDIT - just reprogrammed the buttons to mimic ALT+Left Arrow. This works as Back in Forefox, Safari and IE.

Apart from that I'll run it for a while to see how it goes. If nothing else it means I can test our company website under Safari now which I couldn't do before.

 

[Walter Rowe]

I have successfully crashed is several times today already. I guess that is why they call it beta.

 

[HAC_X]

On my XP box, it won't run correctly, menu text does not show. Oddly enough, if I run it in a Win2K virtuial machine, it works correctly, is as ugly as sin, and crashes constantly.. Guess its not ready for prime time yet..

Cheers
Harold

 

[mchendricks]

I just wanted to let everyone know that an update to Safari for Windows was released today. The new version is 3.0.1. The update is 9.9 MB in size.

Mike

 

[amanita]

Crashed that one too.

It's still got a couple of bugs but othwerwise looks nice. But, I am thinking to myself: do I really need this product? What has it got that IE or Firefox can't do? It's just another nightmare for web developers as they need to write more Javascript or any other code to support it. As it for sure doesn't work the same on Mac and Windows. But I love it on Mac, that's for sure.

 

[DBrim]

Crashed that one too.

It's still got a couple of bugs but othwerwise looks nice. But, I am thinking to myself: do I really need this product? What has it got that IE or Firefox can't do? It's just another nightmare for web developers as they need to write more Javascript or any other code to support it. As it for sure doesn't work the same on Mac and Windows. But I love it on Mac, that's for sure.

Actually, it helps developers out in that they can now test a browser that they couldn't test before.

 

[amanita]

Testing Safari for Mac or Windows IMO are two totaly different things. Of course they share code base but because of different OS-es they behave differently. This means Safari for Windows is just another browser and testing your code against it doesn't mean it will work as expected in Safari for Mac. Just take a look at IE for Windows and Mac. It's a joke! At least it was the last time I was running it on Mac.

 

[C2020]

Try as I might, I can't get IE7 to load it's "add ons". The application kept saying I was running with out add ons but the recommended fix never worked. I was afraid to remove the application because of episodes of system crashes if not done properly.

I welcome the addition of Apple's Safari to the Windows world. Now people can see that an application can run with out the complex downloads and updates. Safari is much like Firefox, an easy-to-use application that allows you to access web sites as you see fit. Unfortunately I never had that responsiveness from IE7 and my frustration level with IE7 has forced me to banish it from my frequently used applications list.

 

[DBrim]

Testing Safari for Mac or Windows IMO are two totaly different things. Of course they share code base but because of different OS-es they behave differently. This means Safari for Windows is just another browser and testing your code against it doesn't mean it will work as expected in Safari for Mac. Just take a look at IE for Windows and Mac. It's a joke! At least it was the last time I was running it on Mac.

I meant "test" as in web site rendering. It's a pain in the butt to test for the 489032 browsers out there, especially if you're running windows (I don't, but that makes my IE compatability hard to do), and the addition of Safari for windows will help show developers how their site renders in that browser.

 

[amanita]

I apologize for not expressing my thoughts clearly. English is my third language but I DO try.

We talk about one and same thing, we just have different opinions. I too was talking about web site rendering. And I do not believe that pages will render the same under both operating systems, especially now with all the AJAX and other whatever-they-are-called "user-friendly" interfaces. It really is a developers nightmare and Safari for Windows is 489032 +1 browser out there. What I want to explain is that it is not a substitution of Mac Safari for Windows developers, it is an addition to a large base of browsers out there. Being a developer myself I now I can not trust testing a piece of HTML code (or any other code) on Windows and advertise it as working under Mac perfectly, simply because Safari exists for both platforms. I know I will test it on both for real user experience as other browsers already exist for both worlds and there are proven differences.

And I am not writing Safari off already on Windows. It sure is nice if one can use a familiar interface across platforms, especially primary Mac users. It will have it's own user base like us here or web designers and similar but I really do not see big switching over simply because it comes from Apple. Again, I might be wrong.

PS: I enjoy a good debate. Hope no one is offended by it.

 

[seafoxfla]

I'll stick to Firefox.