The Browser Den

According to Apple’s Safari website - “The world’s best browser. Now on Windows, too”. Perhaps they could have said “The world’s best browser. Now on the world’s worst operating system”

Currently, it’s a Safari 3 public beta that is available for Mac and Windows. The user interface will not look native to Windows but is more of a pseudo Mac look similar to iTunes for Windows.

What will be interesting is whether they will create special Windows versions of keychain (password manager) and the spell checker, both are part of OS X natively and are used by Safari and most other native Mac apps.

I’m not sure what Apple are hoping to achieve by this, it will be indeed a great benefit to web designers who want to test in Safari and also those that prefer Safari and have to boot in to Windows occaisionally. However, I know of quite a few companies that will at least invest in a token Mac or two for Safari testing and now with a Windows version they may not bother.

It’ll be interesting whether there’ll be any major differences in rendering between the Windows and Mac version. Presumably they’ll use the same Apple Webkit core.
I’m not anywhere near a Windows PC at the moment but will take a look at this as soon as possible. Looking at the description it seems to have feature parity with Safari on the Mac.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 7:53 pm and is filed under Windows, Safari. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.