Safari for Windows? I had to try it. Safari is a superb browser, although most Mac’ers of my acquaintance prefer Firefox for the Mac.
On their download page, Apple touts the many advantages of Safari for Windows, although most of them are advantages only over the rapidly diminishing Internet Explorer 6. However, the top of the list promised that Safari would be, hands-down, the fastest browser. Well, it is. It’s amazingly fast. It also handles Flash exceptionally well. I tested it on some very Flash-intensive sites, e.g. marinewebservices.com and truckwebservices.com, and pages flew in, particularly when compared to Firefox, which seems to struggle with Flash in large quantities. (Flashblock is one of my favorite Firefox extensions.)
But the speed comes at a cost. Windows Safari’s CSS rendering is a shambles compared to its brother on the Mac. Positioned divs overlap each other unpredictably. CSS-based slideshows don’t work. I was curious how it would perform on the Acid2 Test, since Safari for Mac earned well-deserved fame for being the first to pass it. As you can see from the screenshot, it rendered the test image slightly better than Firefox 2, but not by much. Something is clearly wrong with Safari.
I might make a more detailed inventory sometime, but for now, all I can say is another broken browser is not what Windows needs.
C’mon Apple. Keep doing what you do best… iTunes, iPod, iPhone, and … what’s that computer you specialize in? Oh yeah, the Mac. Nice job, that.
It’s interesting because Andrew Jaswa’s passed fine. He has some screen shots up on his site. Mine looked the same as yours. It’s interesting, they did so much work porting the whole core of how Mac apps run, it seems they forgot to make the browser work too… Maybe 3.1 will work! Good to see you back!
Yep, at DE, it looks OK, too. But on my home computer, it’s poor, and sites that have perfectly valid CSS and HTML, such as http://marinewebservices.com/products.php Click on the button on the bottom and see what happens.
Only in Safari.
It happens if you reload the page, probably a bug in the caching of data urls.. or somthing.
Safari for windows has been improved a lot since its first version. The speed and caching power has been dramatically improved. Apple is continuously putting more and more efforts to improve the safari for Windows and very soon safari will show up a whole new browsing experience.
http://www.safaribrowserwindows.com