Safari 3 vs. Firefox 2 and IE7 559
Bobcat writes "Ars Technica has a 'first look' at Safari for Windows, which is interesting because it's written from the perspective of someone new to Safari. It was tested against Firefox 2 and IE7 and aside from the slightly faster page loading, Ars didn't find much to recommend it to Windows users. 'The modest increase in rendering performance is hardly worth the deficiencies, and Safari's user interface simply doesn't provide the usability or flexibility of competing products. If the folks at Apple think that providing Windows users with a taste of Mac OS X through Safari is going to entice them to buy a Mac, it's going to take a better effort than the Safari 3 beta. Even if the final release is more polished and completely bug-free, it still won't be as powerful or feature-loaded as Opera or Firefox.'"
Re:Review summary: "It's not the same as FireFox" (Score:5, Informative)
And here's an example... (Score:3, Informative)
While it might be disappointing that there isn't a true iPhone SDK that lets developers write native apps to OS X/iPhone frameworks, 1.) "Web 2.0"/AJAX applications can be advanced in functionality, and still have access to all of iPhone's services, and 2.) it's not written in stone that there will NEVER be an iPhone SDK or some mechanism or process for adding native applications to iPhone. But the above app is just a quick and dirty example of what can be done.
Safari 3.0 beta in Windows ... my experience (Score:5, Informative)
For a very first attempt releasing the browser for Windows, it's ok, in my opinion. You have to start somewhere... But right now, no - it's not exactly going to win a lot of users over from Firefox or even IE.
The ability to drag a tab out to form a new window is pretty slick, but of questionable usefulness most of the time. Faster rendering and launching of Java applets is always a plus, but just like Ars concluded, it's not important relative to stability and compatibility.
I was able to crash Safari on several occasions just by doing things like hitting the "back" button a couple times after submitting a form on a page and getting dialog boxes popping up asking if I was sure I wanted to re-submit it. I haven't tried it yet myself, but I've also read that it has some bugs with printing multiple pages to a printer if you tell it to start anywhere but on page 1.
I didn't think Safari's text rendering looked quite as "crisp" or easy to read as Firefox or IE does in Windows either. (On a Mac, it looks fine to me, by comparison.)
All in all though, I don't see why anyone would think this release is a "bad" thing? It's free, for starters - and it allows a hard-core Safari-using Mac owner to feel very comfortable if he/she has to browse on a Windows box on occasion. It surely needs testers to keep reporting bugs in it, so it can be improved. But by the time it gets to a release version and out of beta, I think it has potential to be at least another solid, free browser choice for Windows -- if not really a "superior" one.
Re:Pshhh... (Score:3, Informative)
Does this help? (Score:3, Informative)
Fri, Jun 8 '07 at 7:30AM PDT Submitted by gand macosxhints.com
I like to have more than one Gmail account open at the same time. As you can't have more than one in the same browser, I use Firefox's ProfileManager flag to manage one profile for each Gmail account. Type in terminal:
https://mail.google.com/mail/ [google.com]
The first time you do this, you'll create a new profile, one for each of your Gmail accounts. Launch this command each time you wish to open a new account. The Dock will display multiple Firefox icons, one for each open profile. If you wish, you can check "Remember me on this computer." As Firefox passwords are not managed by Keychain, you can store one for each of your accounts. You can also do this in Safari. Type in terminal:
https://mail.google.com/mail/ [google.com]
Each time you launch this command, a new instance of Safari will open. You can then login to a different Gmail account in each. If Safari is not your default browser, use a gmail.webloc file instead of a URL:
path/to/file/gmail.webloc
(Just drag your browser's Gmail favicon to the desktop, and then onto your Terminal window). The Dock will display multiple Safari icons, one for each open instance.
Re:The reason Safari is on Windows... (Score:3, Informative)
It doesn't hurt that it might increase Safari's market share. This helps ease checking pages in Safari, not having a Mac is no longer an excuse for not testing for it.
Re:Review summary: "It's not the same as FireFox" (Score:3, Informative)
If you're serious about entering the Mac market, the key is not to just "port" it, but to attempt a faithful but thorough translation [apple.com]. Sometimes you'll need to rethink your application from top to bottom, because Mac users and PC users have very different ways of approaching problems.
You are almost exactly wrong (Score:5, Informative)
The main reason MS fonts look lighter is that Cleartype renders to pixel boundaries - if the font would naturally go over a pixel boundary when anti-aliased, Cleartype does not render that. The fonts end up looking "lighter" on screen because of it. Apple don't do that. As far as I know, It has nothing to do with colour and black & white.
The upshot is that MS text appears lighter (they even designed fonts to match their rendering philosophy) than Apple text under most circumstances. It also means that the print output on a Mac looks very similar to the displayed output, whereas printing an MS document can make it look a lot "heavier" because the rendering on print is different from the rendering on display.
As for 'proprietary', both rendering engines are 'proprietary'. I don't see why you call one that, and not the other.
Simon
Re:Pshhh... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Safari is requesting a page to be loaded... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Pshhh... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Pshhh... (Score:5, Informative)
HTML itself is a newcomer to the scene. What, you don't remember using Archie or Veronica to browse around? Noob.
Re:Buggy Even on the Mac (Score:0, Informative)
Sub-pixel rendering compared (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Not the point (Score:3, Informative)
As for the rest, Safari works very well on Mac - much better than Firefox in some areas, slightly worse in others. I expect it to improve on Windows as well.
Re:Meh, Safari (Score:3, Informative)
Dave Hyatt.
Re:Review summary: "It's not the same as FireFox" (Score:5, Informative)
This is the reason why whenever people ask me what cross platform toolkit they should use I say: none. Write a GUI for each platform you want to support and use a common backend.. that way you are more likely to write a GUI that is suitable for the platform.
Of course, when they insist, I suggest they use Qt.
- Can't resize by dragging window edge - This is the one the article mentioned, and it's the worst. No other Windows app I've used, not even the particularly egregious, suffer from this problem (excluding the ones that aren't meant to be resized at all).
- Doesn't understand how to maximize - In Windows, maximizing means more than resizing the window so the edges touch the screen edges. 1. It means the window can't be resized, so don't show any resize handles. 2. It means the window takes up the whole screen, excluding the taskbar. 3. It means the window is the only window on screen. Open and maximize Firefox, then open and maximize Safari. If you click on the top right corner of the screen, you would expect Safari to close. But not only does Safari not close, Firefox closes. (Trillian is the only other Windows app I've used that suffers from the same problem, and is the reason why I now set Firefox to confirm before closing.)
- Doesn't understand the taskbar - In Windows, when I click on a window's taskbar button, I expect it to minimize if it isn't already minimized. When I right-click on the taskbar button, I expect to be able to minimize, restore, and maximize, depending on which state it's in.
- Doesn't act like a window - If I press WLK+M, I expect all windows to minimize, not all windows except Safari. If I use the taskbar to cascade or tile windows, I expect every window to cascade or tile, not every window except Safari. In short, I expect Safari's window to behave like a window.
These are problems no other Windows application suffers from except Safari (with the exception of Trillian). Even the worst GTK apps suffer from is OK/Cancel button order switching [aesoft.org].Re:The reason Safari is on Windows... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Pshhh... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Oh really? (Score:2, Informative)
i use extensions, like adblockplus, filtersetg and a whole bunch of others.
is this what you are talking about?
Imagine extensions that can be installed into the OS once and then become available for every application installed on the system.
Re:Review summary: "It's not the same as FireFox" (Score:2, Informative)
Office was always like that, though. For some reason Microsoft wants the current version of office to look like the next version of Windows, even if your version of Windows is ancient (for example, Office 97 in Windows 95 looked like Windows 98). All the UI widgets are custom and don't quite act how they're supposed to.
Re:Review summary: "It's not the same as FireFox" (Score:3, Informative)