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Tuesday June 12, 2007

Safari

Kind of funny that a couple of days after I wrote about the SeaMonkey browser that Steve Jobs would introduce the Safari Browser for Windows. People don't seem that impressed, but to me that represents a huge step for Apple. They are bringing Mac to the people. Plus it can't hurt sales of the iPhone if people are comfortable using Safari (most probably didn't know that Safari was the browser for the Mac) at home and it is one of the key features of the iPhone.


It is a free download and is listed as still being a beta version. So I am trying it out. The installer was only 8 MB, which is pretty compact. And it seems pretty full featured. It didn't import my bookmarks correctly automatically but I was able to grab them (once I figured out where they were) manually. It seems to make text look bolder and a little more crowded, but maybe that is also more legible. Other than that, it looks a lot like Internet Explorer to me, right down to the search box (you can choose Google or Yahoo, not Microsoft which is live.com now) right next to the address box.

When I visited my web page, I then went to SiteMeter which listed the browser for my visit as Safari 1.3 and then said something about Mozilla 5 underneath. I don't know if that means the browser is Mozilla 5 compliant, or if Mozilla is part of the browser.

The only thing I found distinctly different was at the bottom of my Baja web page the Thai numerals at the bottom are supposed to be big (48 point) without underlines but they show up small with underlines in Safari (in Thai at least). I probably have some style codes that aren't kosher, but it renders fine in other browsers.

There were also some remnants from popups on my battery pack web page when I hover over Amazon links. Also when I first visited Mac5 the tiled wallpaper slowly rendered instead of showing up all at once after downloading like with other browsers. The background looked like a waterfall as it downloaded. Most people have internet connections so fast they wouldn't get to catch that.

Hmmm . . . after I hit the Save button for this entry, the page stalled out and just shows itself loading. The entry didn't show up on the blog, but when I opened up SeaMonkey and logged in the entry was there. I opened it and it seemed to be the version that I had saved from Safari. I clicked Save and now it shows up.

Comments (1)

I use FireFox over Safari on Mac and PC primarily because I depend on FireFox extensions including Adblock Plus and Web Developer.

re: "it can't hurt sales of the iPhone if people are comfortable using Safari"

The reported brilliance of this move is to get Windows developers comfortable with developing apps inside Safari, which is how Steve just announced the iPhone can be extended... within Safari.

This article points out how a company makes a profit by giving away a browser.

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