Now that WWDC is over, it’s time to check out the aftermath.
We grabbed Safari and were hit, quite unsurprisingly, with some initial errors. Considering Safari for Windows is still in its beta release, most of these problems will eventually be ironed out.
Although Steve seemed to be proud of Safari’s benchmarks, loading times for pages have remained mostly the same. However, Flash speed has improved and browsing videos on YouTube or MetaCafe requires less patience. Bottom line? Not ready for prime time. It’s a good attempt, but as far as I could see there was very little in ways of improvement over IE7 or even Firefox. In short, wait for the final release.
ah yes, of course there are some problems with the Beta
Apple obviously didn’t have any PCs around to test it on.
‘Cause PCs are icky and give you cooties
‘at least I got chicken’
Just loaded Safari, no errors, however;
1. Typically dumbed down interface for Apple users. Example, I use a Proxy program to filter embedded ads out of web pages. FireFox and IE work fine with this. The only thing I could find in Safari was a greyed our PROXIES button that did nothing.
2. Not very good looking program, the fonts seem harder to read and the border is boring and not very informative.
I’ll use it for awhile but my first impressions are.. “why??”
The reason I use firefox on my mac is draggable (for rearranging) tabs and bookmarks synchronization (through foxmarks) between all my computers (whether windows or mac).
I was excited when I fired up safari beta 3 on my windows box, thinking it would allow me to use .mac syncing…I really hope the final release has that ability. The draggable tabs is a good enhancement.
I also had some issues with javascript, but I didn’t spend any time on determining if that was a site’s fault for deciding my browser couldn’t support it or if it was safari’s fault. I did notice rendering times were a decent improvement over firefox though.
chuck:
On OS X the proxy settings are in the OS prefs not the app prefs so I’d guess that’s going to necessitate a somewhat significant code change before you can set it.
On my Windows XP machine, Safari seemed to install OK, yet every time I tried to start the program it died right away with a “sorry for the inconvenience” error message.
Already have QuickTime and iTunes installed, no problems.
Am sad not to be able to try Safari.
Jason:
Actually, what would be somewhat ironic and funny is if they implemented proxy support the way they do for itunes on windows, since iTunes pulls from IE for those settings.
On the other side, maybe they will build proxy support directly into Safari and have iTunes see if Safari is installed for it’s proxy settings first, if not, grab from IE.
Does anyone know how iTunes renders the ITMS right now? Does it use embedded IE on Windows? Is this doubling as an interesting way for Apple to bring a better rendering platform for iTunes on windows to the party? …or does itunes for windows already depend on the khtml (or whatever KDE library) for rendering?
iApple + iGoogle = iHappy
Food for thought:
1. Eric Schmidt is on the Board of both Apple and Google
2. Al Gore is on the board of both Apple and Google
3. Safari is the ‘app’ gateway for the iPhone
4. Google Maps is the only initial “we love” back-end service dependent app on the iPhone
To be continued…
http://safarissues.blogspot.com/