Monday, June 11th, 2007
Safari for Windows, Ajax on iPhone
Steve Jobs gave the keynote at WWDC this morning, where he announced a couple of items that affect Ajax developers.
Safari for Windows
Apple is releasing the public beta of Safari for Windows today. Steve gave demos of Safari, claiming that it screams:
- ibench html performance: IE 4.6 sec, FF 3.7, Safari 2.2 seconds
- javascript: IE 2.4 sec, FF 1.6, Safari 0.9 seconds
WebKit is getting a real solid foundation on Windows with Apple joining Adobe on the Windows port. I bet Adobe is happy.
iPhone Development
Scott Forstall, VP of the iPhone Division, showed off a corporate address book database application using LDAP. It looks like a native iPhone application. The card looks the same as the address book. You can direct dial from the application, email, display a map (can tie directly into the built-in Google Maps application on the phone), and more.
Since this is all on Safari, I wonder what plugins are available too.
Great to see that the SDK for the iPhone is Ajax. We all know that ;)
Safari for windows: At last!
It crashes a lot ! :(
I confirm, it crashes very easy, but it’s not too bad for a first beta.
Apple Safari on Windows Review:
I am writing this review, just after downloading Safari for windows. I didnt do a reboot after install..
a) Seems to be crashing a lot
b) Google Maps opens, but looks like stuck. I cant interact with the map.
c) Looks like the Safari was released even while it was nt finished.
d) Couldnt right click on Microsoft.com page
e) Issues with plugins.
Apple Safari on Windows Review 2:
Did a fast Rebooot of Windows Box
a) Doesnt Seem to Crash
b) Google Maps is fine.
c) Right-Clicks, Plugins (microsoft.com) is okay
Expect a patch release soon..
Satish
Safari for windows - that’s too cool.
Looking forward to a non-VMWare/multi-boot testing platform :)
I actually don’t love the Safari for Windows thing. Safari being Mac only was a great way to justify getting Macs for work (since you need to test code in all supported browsers, and Safari was on the list). Now how do you force Mac haters to buy you Macs?
oh btw, google documents works with safari 3
I loved Safari for Windows xD, now i
just installed and am running flawlessly on a 20″ iMac with Parallels. Flash, Google Maps, video, etc. without a hiccup. Very impressive.
I’m glad it looks like they’ve fixed the annoying backround-repeat bug
Safari for Windows works perfectly…you have to reboot first, though. Windows is like that :-)
Works like a charm on my XP machine. But does anyone know how to enable the debug menu while running it on Windows? This is vital if you want to use it for web development.
Nice .. I didn’t see this coming though, they got me again ;)
I sure hope you don’t have more than one monitor, and drag it to the second one … where’d it go?
I’ve been running it all afternoon and it hasn’t crashed too bad. I think the performance benchmarks are legit. It’s noticably faster than IE or Firefox. Had a few random crashes, but not many. I’ve been able to move it across multiple monitors too.
I do miss some of the shortcuts I’ve been used to in other browsers - backspace key for back, middle button to close tab.
the gdk build of webkit is noticably faster than firefox on linux as well. is there an open source wrapper for webkit that has tabs/keyboard implemented?
To enable the console on Safari 3 for windows:
(With Safari Closed)
Open:
C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Apple Computer\Safari\Preferences.plist
Add the following:
IncludeDebugMenu
Sorry, the xml was filtered… Please remove the spaces from the xml at the end:
—————————–
To enable the console on Safari 3 for windows:
(With Safari Closed)
Open:
C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Apple Computer\Safari\Preferences.plist
Add the following:
IncludeDebugMenu
Like a previous poster said, I can’t for the life of me figure out how to get a debug window open. I know that on the Mac, you have to open a Terminal window to enable the Debug menu. But, obviously, on a Windows box, there is no Terminal window.
Any ideas? At least IE tells you that some sort of error occurred (even if it does report the wrong line)
Interesting to consider these two items together, along with Dashboard. Apple is getting behind a rich internet application platform based on existing standards. Also interesting that Nokia has already used WebKit (the guts of Safari) for some of their mobile devices.
As with most things from Apple, it doesn’t conform to my windows style. I’ll have it installed when they release a final copy for testing but I’ll certainly not use this for everyday surfing.
It’s my turn to try taming the XML filter :-)
To enable the console on Safari 3 for windows:
(With Safari Closed)
Open:
C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Apple Computer\Safari\Preferences.plist
Add the following (I removed all the less than and greater than around key and true) before the final /dict /plist:
key IncludeDebugMenu /key
true/
I tried it, it works
On 2nd monitor when trying to maximize - disappears.
To retrieve, activate the window on task panel, popup window context menu (Alt-Space or MS menu key), choose Move and press one of the directional keys on keyboard.
Also, the dropdowns are weird. For long list (countries for example) when expanded doesn’t show the currently selected option.
Definitely a beta, and an early one from what I’ve seen. I’ve had it crash or hang several times, and accessibility doesn’t work (you can’t tab among links, only form fields and accesskeys don’t work at all). Loading pages seems slower to me than on other browsers, although rendering seems faster. (I’ve also run into some CSS bugs when calling DOM routines to assign CSS classes after an action is taken (e.g.: sorting a table), but that may be a generic WebKit bug; I haven’t pulled out my dusty old PowerBook yet to try on there.)
Hah. Coolest news I heard all day :D
As for the iPhone: So it has a webserver running, right? I don’t believe they made the apps only work when connected to a net. There seem to be some nice hooks to the phone functions. Interesting other besides the ones mentioned would be the ability to send SMS, access to the calendar and current location. Also some kind of local storage is dearly needed. Maybe Apple will port Google Gears.
Rebooting really helped. How come I haven’t read any comments about the links? At least on my installation, many are messed up - some (it seems like the bold ones) are invincible.
Many people already wrote about the Safari crashing … so I won’t ;)
I’ve noticed several bugs regarding textual styles where the text just does not show up. The styles that have been applied have been either bold or italic. For reference, check out the Mozilla Developer Center in Safari.
What the hell is Apple and their constant foisting of their hideous UI on Windows users? It’s ugly, bloated, non-intuitive, and overall crap.
1. I have to get the bottom right corner of the window visible to resize? That’s dumb.
2. Can’t be bothered to remember the window dimensions I set it at before closing it previously? Dumb again.
3. Ugh, dialogs do that *awful* “swoopy” thing they don on the Mac? For the love of all that’s decent, *WHY*?
4. I can’t Ctrl+Enter to have what I’ve typed in the address bar converted from “foo” to “www.foo.com”?
5. No icon top-left to click on for a menu (like everything else on Windows that I’m accustomed to)?
6. Ugh, those *awful* Mac OS scrollbars just *have* to be mentioned again.
7. Can’t kill it with Alt+F4?!?
8. SSL is indicated with a little padlock icon way up in the top right by the window controls instead of somewhere in or very near the address bar like pretty much every other browser. Clicking the icon does *nothing* but cause it to “flash” from dark grey to white and back again.
9. I can’t Ctrl+Tab/Shft+Ctrl+Tab between tabs.
10. Tabbing seems to only work with form fields. If users can’t tab to links, I don’t see this being used by users with assistive technologies. Then again, that’s not surprising because no self-respecting user that requires assistive technology would be caught dead using anything Mac/Apple. (Yeah, found the ridiculous setting that’s defaulted to “off” in the preferences. Bravo Apple *yawn*!)
11. Clicking in the address bar does not start me out with the text in the address bar selected. No, no, I have to click and drag to get what the address bars in *all* other browsers do for me. Alternatively, I can attempt the super-trouble-prone, mythical triple-click to select everything.
12. Did I mention the ugly scrollbars yet?
13. Times New Roman is the standard font? That *has* to be a mistake.
14. What’s with the over-zealous text “smoothing” that ends up making it all looks not quite normal, not quite bold, universally almost unreadable?
15. There’s no way to tell if Safari is the active window as the titlebar doesn’t reflect the active/inactive window state like pretty much everything else on Windows.
16. Is it my imagination or does 12px on Safari/Win not look anything like 12px on anything else on Windows? I’ll save you the trouble of checking yourself, no, it’s not my imagination. Fonts render at approximately 75% of the size you specify in the preferences (and via markup/CSS too).
So, again, why in $diety’s name do software companies *insist* on breaking UI convention for no apparent reason beyond branding and somehow come away from that decision thinking they’ve done the *right* thing for their potential users? If I wanted a fugly, craptacular, user experience, I’d use a Mac. Why then would I want to use software from a company that eschews the things that could make my experience with their software more pleasant? The only conclusion I can come to — they don’t actually care.
Jeff,
Nice thoughts. I hope Apple addresses the important points when it actually gets out of Beta.
I agree with everything Jeff says.
Has anybody written a SAFARI ADD-ON for FIREFOX, an IE-TAB currently exists. would be good for testing cross-browser thingies.
i love IP phone,u know it safe me lots of money:)
Opened 5 random pages with it, none worked correctly, then tried the ACID2 test, saw the perfect result and laughed :).
Seems nice for the beta, if they make it work so I won’t have to prepare 4 style sheets instead of 3 I’ve to do now, I’ll be happy :)
I’ve just installed it on Windows 2000 Pro. It work’s.
But my site is completly broken (it is not broken on MacOSX with Safari 2).
oh great, a crappy browser on 2 platforms….
why didnt they fix the thing first. or buy firefox…
What’s with the ridiculously blurry fonts in Safari 3? Previously I thought it was just a “feature” of Macs, but now Safari is on Windows and the text still looks like utter crap - even on the lightest “font smoothing” (aka font blurring) setting! If I wanted my eyesight to look this bad I’d stab myself a few dozen times with a blunt fork :P
sweet. lets see when they will release a version that doesnt break every page i visited and know is standards compliant :)
Jeff,
1. Agreed wholeheartedly. Worst part of the Mac windowing system, hands down.
2. It does remember the window size, but when you close it and part of the window is off screen, it goes back to the default window size. Since iTunes does always remember where the window was, I would say this is a bug, but not a huge one.
3. Doesn’t bother me, but I use a Mac normally.
4. Instead you can type foo and just hit enter, and it’ll try http://foo/ and then http://www.foo.com/. I would argue this is better for users like my mom who don’t really understand why you have to put all that extra stuff. It’s probably worse for power users.
5. Agreed.
6. Once again, they don’t bother me, but it’s an aesthetic thing.
7. I was able to kill it with Alt-F4.
8. Agreed about the location. On Mac, the Safari beta does show site info when you click on it; this is almost certainly a bug in the Windows version.
9. Agreed.
10. Name calling aside, yeah, links should default to tab-able.
11. Interesting one. They’re following the Mac convention, where clicking on the icon in the address bar to select the whole thing. Clicking in the text puts the caret where you clicked, like in every other text box. Interestingly, Firefox does this the Safari way on Mac and the IE way on Windows.
12. Uh, yes, you did.
13. Are you being sarcastic here? Both IE and Firefox use Times NR as their default.
14. This is one of those where Safari looks clearly better to me than IE, but once again, it’s aesthetics.
15. Totally agreed.
16. I think you’re sort of right here. The text does seem smaller, but not by 75%. In a page of text on Slate with windows sized equally, Safari has three lines of text more than Firefox and four more than IE.
While I understand some of your complaints, some of them seem just plain wrong, and you ignore what to me is the biggest benefit: speed. I did some benchmarking of my app today on Safari 3, and it blows IE and Firefox out of the water. There are definitely a few quirks in rendering, some of which are surely Safari’s fault, and some of which are probably mine, but I am sure of one thing: it’s damned fast. As someone who has been working on performance for a heavyweight AJAX app, I think it’s great that we have a beta of a browser on Windows that ratchets up the speed *and* pays attention to standards.
I’m a real Apple fan, but Apple made a real mistake with Safari for Win. Damn, It’s crashed like hell even on simple things as bookmarks and comes worrying messages as “Safari seems to be missing resources, please reinstall Safari” and it’s so SLOW.
I’ll wait till it’s out of beta before I’ll try again.
It’s a shame, because Apple rules!
Does this Safari for Win behaves as Safari for Mac? If I develop a page that looks goods and without JS errors on Safari for Win, can I asume it’s ok for Safari for Mac?
@Sasha:
the speed is negligible if it’s not intuitive to work with, and it is not intuitive to work with for windows user. Why do I’ve to have the mac theme? If I wanted mac theme, I’d be either using Mac or have mac like theme installed on my windows, other then that I want my apps to use the theme the OS is using, if every program I ever installed used it’s own fancy theme, having own scrollbars, different behavior on stuff I’m used to work in one specific way etc., I’d sure as hell be confused, not to mention average Joe’s mom.
And about smoothing fonts - it’s bad. Yea, it looks pretty, so what? I don’t want text to look pretty, I want text to be readable.
Am i missing something, or opera AGAIN aint couted as browser .. strange kinda.
Joel (joelonsoftware.com) did a small write up on it as well.
I suspect the issues with aqua-controls, weird text smoothing and so on are due to the fact that apple no doubt wants safari on windows to render pages exactly the same as safari on mac so that when developers add compatibility for safari with safari/win it works perfectly fine on safari/mac.
I have a weird problem with my Safari installation on WinXP sp2; No texts show up on the tool bars or web pages and I can’t type anything in the address bar.
I really hope they’ll release an improved version soon, this would be very useful for testing :)
It crashes on Win XP , but works fine and fast on Win2000 Pro … interesting :)
Very excited about this. Has anyone tried installing the beta on os x? I want to try the new toy but am reluctant to install unstable software on my only mac.
Safari on Windows, Nice one Apple! Let’s just hope the final release is more stable than iTunes or QuickTime for Windows.
On XP Pro it works perfectly (no crashes!), but rendering of the webpages shocks me: 50% of textual content is missing, not everywhere certainly. :)) Only Ajaxian.com shows up correctly! :D
xp sp2 ita:
- starts but no fonts are visualized, neither menu commands nor site text
- seems can’t write in address bar, tried ‘blind-writing’ a url + return but doesn’t do anything
- same behavior for safari only and QT bundle.
completely unusable on my machine, will try next beta
Try installing and running Safari on a PC with Dual-Monitors. It screws up.
It only renders the browser app in the primary monitor, I moved it into another..and boom it vanished, I see the safari icons in the task bar but the app is not seen
Does anyone know the webkit revision that’s in this Safari 3 beta release. And also the webkit r. that’s in the Safari 2.0 that’s installed on most people’s computers? Finally, I’d love to hack the windows Safari to get the older webkit on there, so we can finally debug those older safari bugs.
This will never replace my default browser (Firefox of course), and speed and aesthetics are never going to be what I’d use this for. But if this if the full Webkit and not the [very valiant] first attempt by the guy who wrote Swift, then this will become a crucial tool in my development box while I’m working out my CSS. Thanks Apple, you just saved me three thousand dollars!
it doesn’t render half the page and the margins are all off
Question: Does Safari 3 fix the bugs that kill the back button in Ajax apps? Since Safari poses a lot of problems for ajax apps, I’m a little concerned about Safari becoming popular.
I think things with <base href> and/or application/xhtml+xml-served documents might be acting a bit funny.. I thought the dark border around the UI looks a little odd on winXP, if only because XP’s theme it seems applies a slightly blue one.. but it’s a beta.
All things considered, I think it’s good they have a Windows version out for developers’ sake, at least. If Safari 3 reaches “critical mass” such that it requires A-grade support on Windows, yet differs from the Mac experience significantly in terms of bugs/hacks etc., then I’ll be rather disappointed. I think it would be wise to keep the experience consistent, even at the risk of confusing Windows users with a more OS X-like UI.
Safari for Windows is still very raw. I would say it’s not even an alpha.
I tried Safari on XP tonight, and it worked flawlessly. I was quite impressed, actually.
I don’t really think Safari for windows will do much in the Quality Assurance department. The reason is that it is still using the same windows fonts, and one of the reasons why css gets messed up on mac sometimes is because of fonts (i encountered a positioning problem because of this once) - there is Helvetica on Mac, but there is Arial on Windows… Not so sure… Anyhow its still going to get messier for css developers, they’ll have to develop hacks for safari on windows too :( cuz last time i checked, there are issues with safari rendering css :(
The safari beta doesn’t like dual monitors. If you move it to the secondary and double click the title bar to maximize… it disappears.
Unexpected, but nice. Font rendering needs work still. The fonts look like they are bolded, but aren’t. The AA needs to be fixed on them. Has bugs on links that have background images. If your going from one page that has tables with buttons in the cells to another page that has tables with buttons in the cells, it doesn’t render the new buttons appropriately. Needs to be refreshed to render the buttons properly. Mouse support sucks on the forward and back buttons.
Overall, it’s nice, but needs way more work.
@farhan
In my opinion, a layout can’t be “good” until it is font type and size independent. I try to design all my layouts (including web applications) so the user can override my font type and size choices and things will still work correctly (unless they get really silly).
can one assume that the Safari page render on this windows version looks the same as it does on a OSX?
That’s the most important thing to me: I tend to develop on firefox (thanks to firebug) then check and fix in the other browsers. I’ve always wanted to test it in Safari, so IF this works the same way as it does on mac then its a really very handy tool. But :: if it doesn’t, its just another fix file and a pure abomination to the internet.
So does anyone know if the output of it is the same as OSX’s ?
thanks..
I was excited…but you can never get info Jobs keynotes…http://thenewsroom.com/details/394435?c_id=wom-bc-js
It’s not a bad browser like Safari use to be…
But if they’re gonna make a browser for a windows machine they need to stop trying to import the Mac look…
It’s supposed to be a software… not a fragment of your OS
@Farhan
“Anyhow its still going to get messier for css developers, they’ll have to develop hacks for safari on windows too :( cuz last time i checked, there are issues with safari rendering css :(”
It was true of the old Safari… Safari 3 is suprisingly compliant CSS wise (the one for Windows anyways).
However it’s doubtful people will be coding for Safari on Windows… personally I’ll just expect it to grab my standard compliant code… if it doesn’t well screw it.
Safari for windows does not “Save” any custom settings for future use. Nothing gets saved - like custom bookmarks, status bar settings, home page settings etc.
The most buggy browser ever
Crashes every 2 minutes …