• ARCHIVE
• ABOUT WFC
• CONTACT

Safari comes to the PC

June 11, 2007

From ZDNet:

“Apple plans to ship a version of its Safari Web browser for Windows, and third-party developers will be able to get a piece of the iPhone, the company announced Monday.”

Read the whole article here.

Download the demo here.

Now that Macs and PCs share Intel processors, the lines are now blurred in terms of applications and where they can run. It will be interesting to see whether Safari makes any headway on the PC platform to give IE and Firefox some competition. Probably they are hoping that the new iPhone will also help drive up interest in the browser - or vice versa.

One of the interesting things - is that it claims to be faster than any other browser on any other platform. I haven’t given it a test run yet - but I’m very curious to see how it supports standards, etc… All I know for sure is that Safari finally has tabbed browsing and has a new feature: “Resizable text-fields”. This latter feature will definitely prove interesting for HTML development.

Can we expect IE8 on the Mac in the future? I doubt it.

Update - June 14, 2007

I’ve tried out Safari 3 for a day now - it’s OK. Nothing really wows me about it. It’s the same speed as Firefox (about), or at least I can’t tell the difference. The one thing I truly DO like, is the search feature where it greys out the page except for what you’re looking for. Also, the resizable text box thing is growing on me - especially since I work with Movable Type so much. Other than that - it’s still got a few bugs. I wouldn’t drop my Firefox for it, but however, I would drop IE7 (that sluggish elaphant of a browser) for Safari 3. Firstly, you don’t need an official version of XP to get it (not that anyone would pirate an OS), secondly, it seems to be as standards compliant as Firefox (so far). Just my 2 cents.

I’ll be looking forward to the release version.