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.
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Although I run Mac OS X as a primary platform I still have to keep up to date with Windows and so that meant I had to buy Vista when it first came out.

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A lot of jokes as well as serious criticism has been made about Microsoft’s user access control (UAC) in Vista. The main problem with UAC is caused by applications that are poorly written and expect to run with administrator rights. This has been caused by shoddy development over the years where many people had written software with the assumption it would be run as the administrator user or sometimes the software was old and written for the Windows 9x series that had no access control. (more…)

This article is not intending to be critical of Microsoft but of UK computer retailer PC World (part of the Dixons Stores Group). I needed a copy of Vista for professional reasons and the nearest place to buy it was PC World. (more…)

Microsoft’s recent announcement about making a free XP image for VirtualPC available for testing has raised an interesting question. As VirtualPC is available for Windows 2000 users (and XP is not) does this mean that Windows 2000 users can now download the free Windows XP image for testing that Microsoft has made available and upgrade the bundled IE6 to IE7 and therefore be able to legally test IE7 under XP from a Win2k machine without needing to buy a separate XP licence?

If this is the case this would be great news for companies that don’t want to upgrade to XP or Vista any time soon but do need to test their websites under IE7.

Any experiences with this please leave your comments

UPDATE: Reading some articles in Slashdot it appears that the WinXP virtual image does not validate as ‘Genuine Windows’ so will not allow installation of IE7 on the image. So it looks like the only way to install IE7 on this image would be to bypass the WGA verification. Of course doing that would be of questionable legality.

As many know testing different versions of IE can be a pain, there’s no supported way to run two versions side by side (people have done it, but Microsoft don’t recommend it and can’t guarantee accuracy of results). Their reccomended way was to run another instance of XP in Virtual PC, Microsoft have made Virtual PC free as they’re competing with VMware in the virtualisation market, however XP is not free and so to legally use this solution you needed another XP licence. A rather expensive solution just to test one browser.

Microsoft have now decided to make it free and slightly easier, they’re producing time limited images of XP with IE6 installed for Virtual PC, this means that you and legally run XP within a virtual machine for IE6 testing purposes while having IE7, Firefox, Opera, etc installed on your primary machine. The draw back is that this image is time bombed and will expire in April 2007, however, Microsoft plan to keep releasing updates to this image. I guess the idea is to make it too inconvenient to use this image for anything other than browser testing, if the image did not expire then people could use it for whatever they wanted and in effect get a free XP licence. So it’s not 100% perfect solution, but it’s a major improvement so it will make the lives easier of many web developers and testers.

There now follows an article on the Zune, a bit off-topic for this site but I felt like writing it… (more…)

Windows Vista (previously codenamed Longhorn) has been released to manufacturing. It will be made available to business customers by the end of the month and to personal users by the end of January 2007.

I assume that the version available from the end of January 2007 will be patched upto date with any patches released between now and then. If that’s not the case then why not just release it to the public now? (more…)