Safari for Windows
June 12th, 2007 | Posted in Development, Mac, Techy Talk, Windows | 5 Comments
No more asking friends for screenshots or waiting for the one Mac in the office to be free. Apple have released a Windows version of Safari. Still in beta, from using it all day I have yet to encounter any major issues. I did encounter a rather odd one. As a test, I decided to write this post using Safari. In the paragraph below which talks about performance. It failed to save anything beyond the word “fastest”. It failed to even copy beyond the word fastest. In the end I had to type it all out again if Firefox. Like I said, a little bit odd.
The big question is whether we can rely on its rendering engine to layout pages in exactly the same way as they would be on a Mac. During my, admittedly brief, testing phase, I had my Mac running alongside and did not come across any differences between the two. Which you would expect since they both use the same layout engine engine, KHTML/WebKit.
Apple seem to be making a big thing about its “Blazing Performance” and go as far as to claim that it is the fastest web browser available. My Firefox installation, like many others Firefox users, has a gazillion plugins and extensions and so it probably isn’t hard to be the fastest. Still, on a fast broadband connection it is hard to make a comparison.
The really really really minor issues are to do with its desktop behaviour. It fails to remember the position and state before being resized so defaults to its pre-set window settings. One thing I do a lot is to minimise all windows to gain access to my desktop icons, for some reason Safari seems to escape my Window-M keystroke. I did say it was minor. :)
Try Window-D. I find it to be more successful thank Window-M.
Just tried it now and gvim ignores “M”.
Cheers Gavin. Window-D worked. But it also made my taskbar disappear.
As a Mac boy I use Firefox on OS X. Consistancy across platforms means an easier user experience. Changing jobs meant having to use a PC. That was almost one year ago. Two or three things I still miss.
1. Expose. nothing on XP that really works well. Few utils to try but none really manage it.
2. Quicksilver. Check the site, its amazing. Best free software ever.
3. Apple Key + M. To minimise just the window your currently using. Keyboard shortcuts help so much, but I have a util now that is pretty good.
I also like Expose, like you said there are a few windows alternatives but they don’t half make your pc do some work.
Quicksilver looks good.
I am constantly being told about how good textmate is, again there are windows alternatives that can handle bundles but they are no where near good enough. The one i tried only allowed me to open one file at a time which became unworkable very quickly.
Once you get used to Quicksilver using any machine, Mac or PC, without it is painfully slow.