Safari 3 - Now for windows

[fischerm]

So the big news is that Safari is now available for windows. This is probably mainly for iPhone devs, since the only 3rd party apps for iPhone (for now) will be Web 2.0 stuff delivered through web pages and viewed on Safari-for-iPhone. This lets windows devs write apps for the iPhone without having to find a mac to preview stuff in Safari.

There are two other neat features I have come across so far however. One is dynamically resizable TEXTAREA elements. I find this really cool, since as a web developer, I can never guess how big to make a textarea field. How many columns or rows will the typical user want? You still have to pick a decent default size, but the ability to resize the box if you want more space is sweet.

The other thing is the firefox style find in a window. And boy does it ever highlight the matches. The whole screen dims a bit, and the matched text jumps out at you with an animated pop, and then is outlined in this garish orange and white box. It certainly solves the problem I've had where I search for something, and there's a match, but man I cannot see it on the screen.

[picch]

We were running it on windows today, and it performed a lot worse then firefox. I know it's still in beta, but still.

[dparm]

Yawn....

Downloaded & installed it. No plug-in capability, that's my biggest complaint. I love AdBlock, CustomizeGoogle, and all those good ones...Safari has no support for it.

BTW I don't think page rendering is any faster, especially if you use FasterFox with Firefox.

Also, the obnoxious anti-aliasing that Apple always uses makes things hard to read (I decreased it to the lowest amount).

[bgwinkel]

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v78/TheWinkel/safariinwindows.png

...

Both IE7 and Firefox beat it in speed...it is nowhere near "twice as fast" as Apple marketing says.

Hopefully this wasn't intended for consumers, only developers? I don't think so though.

[moser]

Granted still in beta, but I am not able to get tab browsing to work...

EDIT: Nevermind, got it to work after reboot...

[emurphy1]

There are two other neat features I have come across so far however. One is dynamically resizable TEXTAREA elements. I find this really cool, since as a web developer, I can never guess how big to make a textarea field. How many columns or rows will the typical user want? You still have to pick a decent default size, but the ability to resize the box if you want more space is sweet.

The other thing is the firefox style find in a window. And boy does it ever highlight the matches. The whole screen dims a bit, and the matched text jumps out at you with an animated pop, and then is outlined in this garish orange and white box. It certainly solves the problem I've had where I search for something, and there's a match, but man I cannot see it on the screen.

I also like the fact that you can drag tabs change the order of the tabs. Also you can drag a separate Safari window into another Safari session and it turns into a tab.

[bgwinkel]

I also like the fact that you can drag tabs change the order of the tabs.
Hasn't both Firefox and IE 7 done this for quite a while?

[dparm]

Firefox has done this for as long as I can remember, and you can also drag another FF window in to add it as a tab.

I'm not saying Safari sucks, I'm simply stating that it does nothing that is immensely better than what else is out there. If Apple adds plug-in functionality, I might consider it.

Safari certainly seems better than IE 7 though!

[dcv]

Firefox has had tab re-ordering since 1.5 (and you could do it in 1.0 and lower using extensions).

Andrew filed a bug report today - maximizing Safari in a secondary display on Vista caused it to disappear completely.

To be anecdotal, I don't even know many Mac users that use Safari - I'm a Camino user, and I know a bunch of Firefox users. I doubt Apple is going for marketshare by releasing Safari for Win32 - I'd like to know if their browser marketshare on Macs is as high as IE's is on PCs.

I'm with Mark - this is mostly about letting developers make iPhone apps without buying a Mac.

Though I think it'd be pretty funny if they started packaging it with iTunes (like they do with Quicktime) and have it set itself as default (like they do with Quicktime). Between that and Firefox, IE marketshare would start falling fast...

[emurphy1]

Though I think it'd be pretty funny if they started packaging it with iTunes (like they do with Quicktime) and have it set itself as default (like they do with Quicktime). Between that and Firefox, IE marketshare would start falling fast...
The fact that over 500 million downloads of iTunes have happend on Windows is what makes Apple believe they have a distribution method for Safari 3. The big selling point at WWDC today for Safari 3 has been the Javascript and HTML performance benchmarks. /* I know some of you don't believe them */ But, if those benchmarks are right then Safari 3 is the fastest browser out there. That combined with the fact that it is more standards compliant than either IE or Firefox make it attractive.

As to Mac users use of Safari...you would be surprised, many, many Mac users use Safari...almost exclusively.

[picch]

Is AJAX functionality disabled or just missing in this beta (Windows Edition). Anything AJAX related I try to access with Safari doesn't seem to work.

I've always been a safari fan, and it's actually performing quiet a bit better on my laptop & desktop then the tech machine I tried it on earlier. I am noticing it render javascript based pages a little faster then firefox does. It's not a big difference:

FireFox
index.php: 0.034s
<page name>.php: 0.942s

Safari 3
index.php: 0.030s
<page name>.php: 0.926s

Although, I do miss the built in spellcheck that firefox has. Is there something similar that Safari has?

[bgwinkel]

Lots of 'Web 2.0' apps have never worked in Safari. Things like Google Spreadsheets, docs, etc simply don't work. Some AJAX apps are working for me though, like Google Local.

Biggest complaint? Mouse buttons don't work! And where are all my options D: I feel so restricted. And a handful of other nitpicky things that Firefox, Opera, and IE share. Why would you keep so many of the mac keyboard shortcuts and adopt hardly any of the PC ones? It's frustrating.

EDIT: Not to mention, my auto-hide taskbar won't pop up when Safari is maximized >_<

[picch]

Yeah I knew that. I was assuming they would have fixed that since they are pushing the whole web 2.0 thing for safari in the iPhone.

phpMyAdmin looks extremely weird too on the initial page load. But once the first refresh occurs, it returns to normal

[dparm]

Given that it is in beta, people were bound to find exploits and bugs:

http://www.engadget.com/2007/06/12/apples-safari-a-windows-security-risk/

[fischerm]

Although, I do miss the built in spellcheck that firefox has. Is there something similar that Safari has?
Safari on the Mac just relies on the system level spell checker. Any text box uses the right UI widget gets the system spell checker, so I don't think Safari has any built in.

http://forum.oscr.arizona.edu/attachment.php?attachmentid=348&d=1181593073

[emurphy1]

Lots of 'Web 2.0' apps have never worked in Safari. Things like Google Spreadsheets, docs, etc simply don't work. Some AJAX apps are working for me though, like Google Local.


Not anymore, Google Docs works fine with Safari 3. You must be refering to a 2.x version of Safari. It's true that Safari 2.x had trouble with Google Docs and Spreadsheets.

[bgwinkel]

Not anymore, Google Docs works fine with Safari 3. You must be refering to a 2.x version of Safari. It's true that Safari 2.x had trouble with Google Docs and Spreadsheets.
Huh, it wasn't working on two different computers yesterday, maybe Google updated overnight?

EDIT: Not all of Google Docs is working, I tried messing around with it, and ended up getting a few "Sorry, Safari isn't supported yet" messages. So apparently Google is working fast to fix it.

EDIT #2: Has anyone noticed unbelivably long startup times for Safari? I've seen it on a number of different machines. The window pops right up, but then there's another 20-30 seconds of it sitting there.

[picch]

I've only noticed it on the initial startup after you install it. After that, the launch time is pretty fast.

[dparm]

Add /prefetch:1 to the shortcut, launch it, then reboot the machine.

[bgwinkel]

Add /prefetch:1 to the shortcut, launch it, then reboot the machine.
It's not the program itself, it's the initial page loading. The window pops up just fine, but it takes forever to load the first page, regardless of the homepage. I have a video, but it's compressed in .rar and the forum doesn't like it.

[picch]

Email it to me, and I'll host it. I never got it when you emailed it to me the first time, check to see if it bounced.

[Unregistered]

Agree with the comment on taking forever to load the first page on launch of program. Very strange? does this happen on all machines?

[dparm]

Can anyone confirm this happens on 3.0.1?

[dcv]

Just installed 3.0.1 in a Win2k VM - Safari does indeed take a significant amount of time to load the first page.

Filing a bug report now.

Otherwise, rendering is notably quick and snappy.

[fturtle]

The other thing is the firefox style find in a window. And boy does it ever highlight the matches. The whole screen dims a bit, and the matched text jumps out at you with an animated pop, and then is outlined in this garish orange and white box. It certainly solves the problem I've had where I search for something, and there's a match, but man I cannot see it on the screen.

One thing not to forget is that Firefox is extremely customizable, even without having to dig into the source code. If you prefer a different look for the search highlights, you can customize it (see attachment). I didn't go too far, but if you were up for it, you could add drop shadows, animation, etc. to its appearance just with the CSS.

In order to change the style of mine, I added this to userContent.css:
#__firefox-findbar-search-id
{
padding: 1px !important;
border: 2px solid #FFB2B2 !important;
background-color: #FFD8D8 !important;
color: #4C4C3A !important;
font-weight: bold !important;
-moz-border-radius: 5px !important;
}

If you wanted to dim the entire page as Safari does, you could modify the quick search implementation (/toolkit/content/global/findBar.js) such that it creates a top-layer gray element with a css-defined opacity when it highlights the text.

[dcv]

^ That's an AWESOME trick.