Notice - ONLY 5 % market share for Safari, that's LESS than the Mac market share, so that means not even all the Mac owners use it at all!!!! Safari is a piece of shit, it crashes on complicatate sites, especially with lots of Java or Flash, it's NOT even Current HTML standards compliant! In FACT, a huge percentage of Mac users DON'T use Safari as their primary browser! They use Firefox!

Windows users aren't going to migrate, MOST won't even migrate to Firefox or Seamonkey, both superior to IE already! Windows users hate Apple, and with good reason. Watch the tele.

Reg, either you're such an Apple Whore, or your staff is pretty stupid to fall for this.

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

He's really lost it this time! So Safari, which I would never have heard of if it wasn't for the fact that I'm a Network Admin at a web dev company is going to take on the big boys? Why - Safari's crap.

The only reason it has a market share (Something like 2% I think) is because people use it when they first get a Mac to download Firefox or Opera.

And I love the thought that developers should worry about not being able to install clients on the iPhone - instead use AJAX. That's great Steve, how the f*ck are the end users going to access these web apps without 3G?

Moron.

They scoffed at the iPod as well. They scoff at the iPhone. Now they scoff at Safari for Windows. We shall see.

I'm posting from it now.

Safari is a piece of crap. I use Firefox because it's available on all the platforms I use (PC, Mac, Linux, Solaris).

Who cares about the iphone...an overpriced, over-hyped, feature-deficient toy.

Jobs had better hope it gets hacked - at least that way he can sell them to geeks to play with, like the Apple TV.

If it's any good, it'll get its chance. I'm always ready to try a new browser, I don't care what the name is or where it's from. But, it has to be secure, it has to allow extensions, it has to block pop-ups and, ideally, it should allow me to also block unwanted images and iframes.

Having never used Safari, I don't have an opinion on it, but I must admit that Jobs touting - what was that again ? speed in tab swapping ? Who does that ?

Not me. So I guess that is to be filed in the bling glass cabinet.

Okay, Steve, so we've got bling. Got anything actually useful to talk about ?

...and, guess what, they're not called IE or Safari. No Linux version of Safari I see, leaving Firefox (OK, Seamonkey too I guess) and Opera as the only two browsers available on the three major desktop platforms (although Netscape 9 is apparently back on 3 platforms again in beta form afer outrageously becoming a Windows-only browser for version 8 - it's lost so much market share now that it's off the radar of almost everyone).

I tried out Safari on Windows and noticed a couple of things - 1. like IE7, I find it hard to get rid of just the Search box in the top right (it's bizarrely "welded" to the Address bar, so you have to ditch both or keep both!) and 2. the chrome is Mac-based (maybe there's an obvious way to change this?) making the browser look completely out of place on Windows (ironic that that's the charge most often levelled at Firefox on Mac OS X!).

I'll stick with Firefox - works on all 3 platforms and is far more customisable with extensions and themes than any other browser out there.

First Steve, as PC user I use Firefox over IE, basically because it is much better and more stable. Why would I want to go to Safari.......

Second, the iPhone, why make it so only Apple can really develop for it. I can see why you have a bite out of your logo. Did u pass that on then force it back mid bite......

Why Oh why do we need the iPhone anyway, I have no doubt it will do well, but at least 85% of mobile phone users use the phone to.......make calls and send text messages and thats it.

Yuck!

Looks like a clunky non-Windows app pretending to live in harmony with Windows and failing (ignoring Windows themes, not using standard Windows dialogs which in turn makes it slower, etc), and then worse Apple have brought their own font rendering and it look hideous!

Why not use the built in Windows font system and rely on each user's own settings for ClearType etc, and then the fonts will look the same as the rest of the system.

Whilst I could excuse them for trying to force anti-aliased fonts on us (which at first glance often looks bad), they've done it really badly. ClearType works, this doesn't.

Other than that, I've already found a few sites that don't work. Some dynamic HTML / AJAX stuff doesn't work. Some things are sluggish.

Oh and millions may download iTunes but it doesn't change the fact it's a terribly designed piece of software. Most people only use it because they have to with an iPod (if they haven't worked out alternate ways).

What is the point in having a "popular" browser, if it only feeds you with what they want you to know rather than with what you can know.

Content is the Ace, King, Queen, Jack of all Trades and a Browser [Media Company] with a Dedicated and AIntelligently Designed, New and Real, QuITe SurReal Media Content Feed, will Eclipse and Lead Any and All Others as IT takes you on Safari to Sights and Sounds/Thoughts and Missions under their Control.

Prepare yourself for A.N.Other Byte at the Apple..... in a Quite Alien Support for Magical Mystery Turing.

Very Stealthy Steve...... they don't even See IT Coming ...... that which Changes Lives forever........ Inside AInformation aka Special AIntelligent.

I'll take a barrel of them APIs, alsjeblieft. ASAP too.

PS. Does the Register know what Investigative Journalism is, or are there queries lost in Space when they try to send them to Source? Ye Olde Route Switching to Compromised Root Server Trick to keep everyone frigid in the Dark rather than frolicking in the Light of Sun Networks........ Locked Down and Out in Exclusive Closed Systems rather than Empowered and Enabled by Open Source.

Virtual Self Actualisation is an Interesting AstraMetaPhysical State Way Beyond anything that would Think to Confine and thus to Consign to Executive Administrative Control.

IT is capable of, and is specifically dDeveloped for, in terms which I am sure you can understand..... New World Order Programming ...... even if you have a difficulty in Believing in IT. That mental block would be entirely yours and would extend no further, other than to be matched in others with the same limiting and limited reasoning.

You don't need to Believe for IT to believe in ITself 42 Present to you ITs Programs..... you merely need to Look, Listen and Learn as IT EdutAIns U2 with ITs QuITe Subliminal Feeds.

And that's Big Brother/Sassy Sister Territory with a Big Mamma to Satisfy........ Seventh Heaven for ITAngels.

It's a browser. The new Beta is pretty fast - but really, that's hardly an issue these days. Moveable tabs is good, but not out of the ordinary. I don't know if they've fixed the memory leak issue.

However, Firefox has its issues, too (doesn't always respond to keyboard commands). They're all better than IE, and if Apple needs to do this as an iTunes for the Windows iPhone users, then what's the big deal?

The geeks will switch browsers all the time depending on nano-second speed differences, most people just want to use the web - and Safari is both useable and likeable.

Just read on /. that they've already discovered loads of security bugs in Safari. OMG, it _is_ crap ;)

Well it seems it crashes when authenticating with a proxy server: http://psyphen.efx2.com/view/93846/Apple-Safari-Windows/

Jack of all trades master of none?

Has he ever followed anything through?

the ipod, rather nice looking, great if you want to play a few albums; sucks with your entire collection in it, unless you are willing to select a single album to play every time; or setup playlists. I think they even hid my photos so I can't retrieve them.

iTV great, but why will I buy it when my XBMC still rules the roost; do everything XBMC does, and then i'll buy it. yes you can mod it, but it's either too hard, or tbh i can't be assed.

Iphone, my hermes looks just like one now. of course it won't take long to workaround their workarounds. but if it's like the iTV it will be too difficult for most; or just too long winded.

Safari, I've never used it, tbh i'm not likely to.

Imac, girlfriend says she still prefers to shave her legs.

the last completed thing i've seen was probably a mac ii, and even then there was something missing .....

"...there have been over a half a billion downloads of iTunes to Windows machines." How many of those were 'bundled' with QuickTime player and never used? Only the very recent versions of QT have been downloadable without iTunes .

Using Safari 3.0 on OSX & WinXP, for me it's as fast as my Camino 1.5 on the Mac (which is to say - fast!) and seems faster than IE or Firefox on Windows: Not bad for BETA software - and a 1st attempt at that. So here's one converted user, won't take many more like me to make some sorta dent.

And Firefox's 15% isn't that flash - given it's supported on multiple platforms, compared to Safari's 5% when offered only on Mac OSX.

For Apple to score a significant victory here, it doesn't need to beat IE market share (which it never will) just gain a big enough toehold to force web developers to properly code their sites; to provide a healthy platform for iPhone web-app development; to further give PC-users a taste of the 'Apple Way' - maybe for some conversions; and simply to weaken MSoft's tight grip on internet standards generally. No other company (maybe Google?) has the ability to do this. I wouldn't bet against them - their recent record is too strong to laugh at.

As a web developer, I'm happy to see any modern browser show up on Windows. The more people introduced to browsers that are reasonably standards compliant, the more pressure is bought upon MSFT to bring their browser kicking and screaming into this millennium. Front end developers spend significant amount of time just making IE seem to work as well as Firefox, Opera and Konqueror/Safari.

What? iTunes is not bundled with QuickTime player. However, the Quicktime media layer IS installed when you install iTunes for Windows. It's unlikely that iTunes was installed on the PC without the user initiating it....

IMMSMC, Safari is based on my favourite web browser: Konqueror. Which itself is coming to Windows soon with the advent of KDE4 -- and unlike Opera, Konqueror is GPL so you get the full Source Code.

I am a student at uni and contrary to popular belief most people that I know who aren't computer experts use iTunes on Windows. Why you ask?

1) iPods. All us youngsters have these funny iPod things nowadays (except me it seems) and what is bundled with that? iTunes! Why use two different apps to manage and then load your music onto your MP3 player when you can use one!

2) Sharing. Everyone at uni loves sharing music and why go to the bother of having to find the music, copy the music onto a pendrive, go to another computer, and then copy it on to that (which is illegal btw) when you could just listen to it through iTunes sharing.

3) Music downloads. I am not really sure why anyone would want to use iTunes to download music, but strangely they do.....

At least 75% of people I know at uni use iTunes so that is a fairly heft amount!

So anyway, how is Safari going to dominate the world? Well IMO Safari 2 for Mac sucks, that why I use Opera. It crashes a lot and doesn't work too well on some sites, and that is just the beginning. But if Apple is going to bundle it with iTunes and QuickTime, and when it installs make this the default browser most people aren't going to change it. They will find it works much better than IE7 and probably won't even know how to change it back.

The only people who won't be using Safari in this case are those clever enough to install another browser. Apple 1 Everyone Else 0.

The only reason the downloads for iTunes on Windows looks so rosy is that they bundled the damb thing with QuickTime. I've lost count of the times I've had to re-remove iTunes after it sneaks in with the lastest QT update. Now, I suppose I'll have to play wack-a-mole with Safari too, huh?

Way to make broadband feel like dial-up, Steve!

Ok. I use a Mac at home. In fact I have two. One 'anglepoise' G4 iMac and a nice Intel Macbook.

At work I use all PC's (I work in IT).

But the common software I use across both is Firefox.

Why?

Because Safari doesn't support the sites I want to use. My online banking doesn't work. Loads of forms don't work. Try booking a holiday with First Choice using Safari - it doesn't work. So I predominantly use Firefox on my Mac and also at work on my PC.

I downloaded Safari for the PC just to test, however, being in a corporate environment it sucks instantly because the proxy doesn't work, and you can't turn the proxy settings off as in Firefox or IE (it's greyed out for some reason).

I hate to say it, but Safari for Windows could end up being another Apple Newton....

(And people call me a mac fanboy...)

I've lost count of the number of QuickTime "updates" that have "helpfully" included that pile of cack known as iTunes. If what Jobs wants is to shove Safari down our throats as part of the same process, then he can stick it where the sun don't shine; we'll just stop using or accepting QT files.

good grief - how could two so simple things evoke such hysteria...

get a grip people - nothing more than a browser and a phone.

move on, nothing to see here

"... offer a browser that lets you drag tabs around ..."

So? Firefox does this already.

"...As a matter of fact, there have been over a half a billion downloads of iTunes to Windows machines. Over half a billion. And so we know how to reach these customers, and we're going to do exactly that,"

Hmm. If they're thinking of including a Safari download in the iTunes download... well, that's just a bad idea for a whole lot of reasons.

"How many of those were 'bundled' with QuickTime player and never used? Only the very recent versions of QT have been downloadable without iTunes"

I've always seen iTunes as malware for this very reason - I notice safari bundled with iTunes is the default option. Forcing/tricking ppl into downloading something then crowing about the stats is pretty lame.

And as for Safari - well it's great news to have another interpretation of 'standards' to add the the test suite - I doubt it'll see much more use than that on my part. I migrated to Firefox because it was a clear improvement on any other browser at the time. This beta doesn't raise the bar in any area that I can see and the ugly chrome and poorly rendered fonts don't exactly create a good first impression.

I'm waiting for Jobs to launch the iRack.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw2nkoGLhrE

That people wouldn't call AJAX a 'standard'. Its not. Its just a jumble of technologies that, while really useful, don't actually mean anything. Even the guy who coined the phrase Ajax said its not an acronym, even though people insist on claiming it!

By the logic this 'reporter' is using a stanadard is something thats heavily used out there. In that case then IE /is/ the defacto standard and everything else is incompatible. Obviously thats not the case.

...save yourself some grief. Ignore Safari.

Some Apple people will tell you it's the best thing since ...well ...since best things were invented! But then again, these same people will tell you that the Apple UI is also the best thing bla bla bla ....and it most certainly is not; it has some glaring deficiencies and some extremely annoying "features".

I agree with an earlier post - the only time I used Safari was to download Firefox. Actually, if I'd been thinking, I'd have probably been better off using wget.I can't comment on whether Safari crashes (I've not used it enough), but it certainly lacks any features like ad blocking, script blocking, proper cookie control, etc etc.

Why would you use anything other than Firefox on the Mac? Doesn't make sense.

Locking down Safari and sandboxing the iPhone may solve many of the security risks attending AJAX but they won't solve the inherent performance problems. In terms of speed: Opera is by far the fastest of the browsers out there but even with Opera AJAX is slow. If I was doing this kind of stuff I'd go straight for Adobe's Apollo which is going to lever Flash and PDF's strength and will allow for highly optimised runtimes and caching strategies.

The only reason that safari is on windows now is so that more web devs will support it, currently most don't even look at it. Secondly, the fruit must have been given some advice by their google board member that he pays firefox 50 mil a year for search results and that apple is retarded for not trying to get a larger piece of the cake....

The iphone, is going to sell iike hotcakes, especially since its a new ipod and it can rotate the screen automatically! He could put no applications on besides that and the interactive poo game and it will still sell out.... thats the power of the ipod brand... So basically in this case its screw you developers.... Frankly nothing on the windows mobile platform can touch the iphone in terms of usability,or functionality. Face it, apple does slick REALLY well

... on the iPhone development process. It won't take long for the iPhone to hit it's market saturation point with the mindless Apple sheep buyers. Anyone who has the phone for serious use will realise that not letting 3rd party apps be developed properly for the device will kill it.

Look at handango and the amount of apps available for symbian and Windows Mobile (which has a large touch screen product range). I haven't heard of any carriers being compromised yet and these devices have been out for years.

Safari is too little too late I think, what's Jobs trying to do, suddenly make the Mac a competitior to PC's!!! Jobs you can't bolster your pensio fund like that, it's too late. Stick to the swiss watches of computers and leave the market be.

There really isn't a usable browser out there yet. They all suck. The main issue being that most actually develop the GUI not the rendering engine.

A group should focus on making the best possible rendering engine that

is easy to use and maintain and extend. Another separate group should

work on a reference browser implementation that is only used for testing.

Everything else should be made by third parties like differently featured browsers.

Currently my best be is on WebKit/khtml/webcore to become that rendering engine and then for browsers to be build on top of it.

Webkit is a very neat way of implementing Web 2.0 applications. The most common use for it so far has been Dashboard in OS X, and I suspect that this is where Safari will be going on Windows. Take a step further from that and Webkit provides a portable API of the kind that Google has been talking about in the last month. Steve, as a showman, has to promote it in a desktop way though as that's the only way he can.

Safari itself is very underfunctional compared to Firefox 2, Opera 9, and even IE7. If Safari 3 has caught up with the features that make Firefox and Opera compelling, it will become a contender, but my feeling is that it will become an application platform that has an underused browser window but a ubiquitous rendering engine.

ok, so i tried the beta version of this browser and the first site i visit, it fails to load.

I did like the ability to take a screenshot of the current page and send it on as a bug.

but for performance, it is outdone by IE7, Firefox, Opera and even another beta Gran Paradiso.

Apple have a long way to go with this, so i will reserve judgement until an updated verion is released, but if this is ghood enough to make a judegement on then it will not remain installed on any machine i use for more than a day before it is removed and consigned to the "get the hell off my pc" bin

i use firefox on my mac, im beginning to dislike job's arrogance and b*llsh*t its gettin' old and tedious, i thought safari was based on konqueror rendering technology from the os community anywayz.Jobs really needs to get off his high horse, im loving the way this iphone is like a dog with no teeth, no 3g what the hell are you supposed to do with it on line then? pathetic

"good grief - how could two so simple things evoke such hysteria...

get a grip people - nothing more than a browser and a phone.

move on, nothing to see here"

The problem isn't that Jobs wants to port Safari to windows (rofl really, the first thing I do on *any* computer, be it PC or Mac, is go dl firefox), the problem is that it's gonna *force* it onto users just like he *forces* his crap iTunes on you when you dl QT.

He can shove the three of them in a very dimly lit place.

I notice that there's no speed comparison with Opera in the main article. Although the comparison is not quantified it'd be good to know how Opera fares.

@Killian; regarding the comment of "Forcing/tricking ppl into downloading something then crowing about the stats". I wonder how IE became the most widespread browser installation in the first place, especially considering it's regarded so badly. You can't really knock Apple for bundling when they're only trying to keep up with the competition.

I downloaded it in great anticipation! Excellent, I thought, another browser!

It crashed on loading! Yes, it is beta version, and they will fix it, but like iTunes it is just going to be bloated and run crap unnecessary services that hog resources.

I'm sticking to Firefox, it has been fine since v0.6 and is getting better with every release. Can't wait for v3. At least Firefox can be customised, unlike Safari or IE7.

In between, it crashed while rendering a standalone JPG, which kind of sealed it for me. Only one bug on my Safari, but a big enough bite enough to put me off doing it again.

A lot of the negative comment here is from people who are, or who think they are tech savy. However the Safari release is not aimed at you, they don't care about you, as you'll tinker with/complain about any new browser. Safari is firmly aimed at the people who like ITunes, who can install what they like on their machines at home or work. Why release a browser into a market which is well covered?, because the competition is weak, and more importantly the amount of time and effort expended in producing it vs the potential positive side effects it produces is a no brainer. I can see Mr. Jobs 18 months from now, telling the world that Apple's share of the browser market has leap from 4% to 20% or whatever, which will make the herd think about getting on the band wagon, and trying other Apple stuff. Its almost free sales publicity "Apple continues to grow".

btw I downloaded and installed it no bother, never had a problem with Safari 2 either, visiting any site, or ordering/booking anything. Perhaps not every site is produced to be compliant with standards or different browsers?

It contains the spyware/bloatware Bonjour

If you really want to mess your system up install Bonjour

I know it is an optional install but any company that offers this must be treated with suspicion and caution

pretty harsh on a Beta. Wow -- especially considering the long history of Windows being the King of Crap UI.

I use Firfox 99% of the time on Windows and Linux, and only use IE for those really badly made websites that will only load on pure IE. I have tried most other browsers and always seem to gravitate back to IE/Firefox. I used to work with a number of very carefully designed web apps and my support team for the product were thoroughly trained, sorting an IE or Firefox user's issue in a matter of seconds. We used to HATE getting calls from Mac users with Safari - they usually refused to accept that it could be a problem with Safari, that we had to be "Luddites" not to have a solution that worked seamlessly with Safari, etc, etc. They would insist that Safari was bang-up-to-spec on standards. We tested it, it was not. Our standard answer became to advise the users to use a PC (and hold the phone away from our ear when they shrieked) or download Opera. I, for one, will most deifnately NOT be trying Safari on Windows.

Wow, there are some really rabid comments here.

First, a good number of Mac users use Safari, including myself, and I'd call myself a power user, having developed commercial sites as far back as Netscape 2.0 and being involved to a small degree in the CSS specification. In fact Safari supports some CSS features that are not available in Firefox, such as alpha transparency - rgba(100%,0,0,0.5) - and the <canvas> tag which is poorly supported in Firefox.

Macs have about 5% of the market and Safari is about 2.5% of the market share, so clearly at least 50% of Mac users are Safari users.

Third, if you have a website that doesn't work on Safari, that's 100% the fault of the site owner. There hasn't been any reason to code for a particular browser since about 2000 - most web developers still wouldn't recognise an HTML legacy attribute if you paid them, and all modern browsers have excellent overall support for CSS. Email the site and bitch at them, not the browser - I did this with First Direct Bank after their recent redesign broke internet banking on Safari and guess what? It's working again.

Fourth, what does it matter? All browsers have their faults. Safari has lousy cookie management. Firefox is, in my opinion, clunky and slow, although I'm sure fanboys will disagree. Some people like Nokia, some Sony Ericsson, it's the same argument and just as futile. Get over it.

Hmmm... a browser launch? On Windows?

Seems strange, until you consider that Apple have no office suite as such. Might it be a trojan horse for a suite of hosted applications via Ajax? This would make sense, if you think about it. The much-rumoured Apple Office has not yet materialised, and there's a palpable push on just now in the serviced application arena. And, of course, if Apple launched hosted apps that rely on Windows ActiveX or similar, and then MS pulled that rug from under them by 'updating' IE so that the apps got broken... what better way than to have your own browser?

Gary

websites checked for Safari compatibility now

browsers on PC = 4, excitement level = unchanged, still using IE7 for most browsing

Ive not used Safari before, nor have I tested my web applications on it due to the very low market share that it has in the stats.

However if they bundle it with iTunes (which lets face it is a big possibility) then its going to sky rocket in installs

How compliant is Safari? Are we talking Microsoft compliant or Firefox compliant?

Let's have a look at current Apple -> Windows ports to get an idea of what we're in for...

iTunes is a memory hog, it leaks memory faster than an MP in a cash for questions cross examination. It uses a non standard interface which leaves experience windows users clicking buttons and menus all over the place trying to find an obvious function (even when you do find them, you're not 100% sure if it's done what you expect). It can't even conform to the standard window dialogs, instead throwing up Mac style "do not save" boxes. The only reason so many people use it is because the iPod is also non-standard and requires iTune to populate it's screwy file system.

So thank you Saint Steve, but I'll be sticking to my Firefox on my XP and Linux boxes, and Opera on my mobile.

Oh, and to the guy that said "we scoffed at the iPod, we scoffed at the iPhone", I'm still scoffing at the iPhone, and will continue laughing until it gets MMS messaging and all the other things £5 European phones have had for years,

My PCs have various IEs and Firefox installed on them. My girlfriend's Mac has Safari and Firefox. I use firefox and IE about 50/50 on the PCs, but we never use Safari on the mac, it's just pony. Who cares if it is twice as fast as IE/Firefox, twice as fast as easily fast enough, still falls into the easily fast enough category.

As for the iPhone, I can't think of any other platform that expects to get large market penetration that has ring-fenced development. What are they thinking?

Doesn't work in a corporate environment as it crashes every time you try to authenticate via a proxy. I was also not impressed by the comment that the password was sent in clear text.

I don't think that they have thought this through ...

Dominic - you are wrong. iTunes is bundled with Quicktime for Windows... I used to get forced to go several layers into the site to get an un-bundled version. Normal people wouldn't notice the checkbox with the latest download site. Don't believe me? Check yourself!! :)

http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/

Just tried it. No, it's not faster than FireFox. If anything, Firefox is twice as fast. And not only that, Safari doesn't give anywhere near the choices and flexibility FireFox does - and that's not even looking at all the extensions that are so easy to get for FireFox.

Downloads: in Firefox, you can choose to either have them downloaded automatically to your folder of choice, OR you can choose to have it ask you every time you download a new file. That's always been my preference - I want to put it where I want it when I download it, not have to go browse to some arbitrary downloads folder and then move it where I actually want it. In Safari, you just get to choose which folder is your downloads folder. No thanks.

Tab bar: In FireFox you can choose to have your tab bar shown all the time, or hidden when you don't have more than one tab open. No such option in Safari. No thanks.

And there's many more such things. Unfortunately for you Mr. Jobs, if I really wanted a browser that dumbed-down I'd just use IE7 and done with it. But I want a browser that lets me choose what I want, not stick me with what some clueless moron in a suit thinks I want. No thanks.

...I use Firefox 2 on Mac for most web tasks, whilst reserving use of Safari for downloading pornography.

That way, if I need to "clear my tracks" I can just flush the cookies and browse history without it impacting my mainstream browser.

If I had Safari for Windows, I would no doubt apply the same practice there too.

;-)

I think a lot of this discussion is missing a key point, Safari 3 is still in beta. Betas crash and burn at times.

Some valid points about the beta that are irritations in using it is the lack of support for current HTML standards. This means that simple things like line returns are ignored. So that is definitely something that must be fixed before the mainstream would ever start using it on Windows.

Firefox is superior to Safari on both Windows and Mac OS X, at least for now. However I have found very little mainstream usages of a browser on the Mac platform that Safari can't handle. Again what it can't do are irritating but would hardly compel me to say it sucks. It is pretty damned fast.

Opera is not as fast as it once was but competitive with Firefox. Seamonkey never won me over. I liked the email client though.

I guess the real point here is look at how many competitive browsers there are and every damned one of them is faster than IE 7 and the majority do everything IE 7 does. Still between IE 6 and IE 7 you have an 80% or so market share. I recall in 1995 when MS and Netscape were going at it and the competitive environment back then was really driving the innovation of browser technologies. MS started off with less than a 5% market share and everyone laughed. Netscape still charged for their browser back then. MS gave their browser away and most people in comments on sites like this one said that IE wasn't worth anything therefore they could not charge for it.

How IE came to be the dominant browser cuased a lot of legal issues for MS to be sure but the end result is the same. If Apple can create some competition in the market place and erode IE's strangle hold on market share I am all in favor of it. Maybe everyone will benefit from the competition and browsers will become streamlined applications with minimum code to do the task. Wouldn't that be nice.

I'm a big fan of Apple and Jobs, but unless they get serious about making Safari more standards-compliant and stable, this is going to make my life more worse, not better. At least the bugs in IE are well-documented, and finding workarounds is easy with Google. Safari is a mystery, because even on the Mac the market share isn't quite enough to spend much time on.

A few years ago, iTunes was seen as the way to get Windows users hooked on QuickTime as the Mac gateway drug, but Flash stole that market out from under Apple. This attempt to use iTunes as the delivery method for Safari as the gateway drug will fare even more poorly, because Firefox already stole the market. I am unimipressed.

"You can't really knock Apple for bundling when they're only trying to keep up with the competition." Dean Varney

Umm... I think I can. Just because M$ are worse offenders doesn't excuse it. I've _never_ wanted to download or install iTunes (or have it run on startup) but the bundling with Quicktime has always made me do that, then jump through the hoops of getting rid of it. Malware.

That said, it is a drop in the ocean compared with what M$ get up to. :)

I've had another look and can't detect any great increase in speed over FF/IE7.

Unimpressive. But is is only a beta

If putting Safari on Windows means that iTunes and Quicktime STOP using Exploder proxy settings I for one will be delighted.

As for the iPhone, it won't have to be THAT good to knock any Windows Mobile smartphone into a cocked hat. The UI on an iPhone will make a touchscreen phone a joy to use. As an HTC Magician user I will switch provider to get my hands on one. Synchronisation works better with The Missing Sync than it does with ActiveSync,

As a web developer who makes an effort to have sites work cross-browser, this offers the possibility of *removing* the need to have a Mac on hand for testing purposes.

Given the choice, my preferred environment is neither Windows or the Mac, but I need to have a Windows box around for IE testing anyway, so being able to run Safari on there too would be great.

I suppose I could always just use Konqueror as a Safari stunt double, but it's nice to know that a site works for the actual browser, not just it's near-relative. If I need one less computer to do that, all the better.

Kind of funny that the rabid Firefox fans here are so anti-Safari. Don't you folks realise that the more popular Safari proves to be on Windows, the better for Firefox and web standards it will be? Why? Because Safari will *not* take market share away from Firefox - it is a browser aimed at people who browse lightly per session and don't want or need power-user features such as extensions, etc. IOW, if it does get adopted by anyone, it will be adopted by current IE users first. Imagine market share stats (if not better ones) in a years time that read Firefox 15 to 20%, Safari 15 to 20% and IE 65 to 55% instead of the current stats of Firefox 15%, Safari 5%, IE 75% (note, I've given a generous 5% share to all other browsers). That is just a win-win situation for Firefox users no matter which way you look at it, because it is IE that is going down, not Firefox.

FWIW, wrt to web standards, Safari/WebKit/Konquerour is *more* compliant than Firefox. As one small example, WebKit (and therefore Safari 2, not 3) was the first rendering engine to pass the Acid2 test, and that was donkey's ago. Where WebKit has been historically deficient is in JS support, not web standards support. This is why, browser sniffing idiocy aside, many of the sites that don't work in Safari 2 fail, not because of a lack of web standards support. Both have been improved immensely in the latest versions of WebKit. For those people saying, "Safari just isn't compatible with many websites", this will change to "Safari just wasn't compatible with many websites"

FWIW, I don't use Safari. It is too feature-light for my tastes. I use Firefox on my work PC and OmniWeb (another WebKit based browser) on my Mac. Interestingly, OmniWeb is a good example of an advantage that Safari has over Firefox - the rendering engine (WebKit) is just much easier to adopt and use in other applications by other developers than Gecko. Therefore, we could actually see even more third-party browsers on the Windows platform, offering unique and great features unavailable elsewhere, but sharing a common open source rendering engine in WebKit.

I'll use Safari on my Windows box as soon as Saint Steve lets me dual boot to OSX on the same box.

...is that by sticking Safari on Windows computers, he's going to put off any Windows users who've never used a Mac to switch.

I use Mac & PC daily - I must prefer the Mac because I don't swear as much when I'm using it. But that said, Safari is wank.

Hardly suprising Firefox are happy, they need a new browser war to get people talking about them again - not that I think this is going to me much of a war, more a school playground kicking.

Yeah ... but lots of those iTunes "downloads" are because Apple force-feeds them that when you try to download Quicktime. I didn't use it, but I made the mistake of letting a friend have Admin. access to my laptop and got riddled with iTunes. (I have only used it twice, and that was because my girlfriend has an iPod).

I don't want the POS player if I don't have an iPod!!!

And for locking up the iPhone... great. Now I know I am definitely *not* buying one. If I were to buy a phone that costs as much as a PDA (or hell, a damn PS3), I expect it to very well damn do what a PDA does, develop software like I do with PDAs. Web 2.0 "apps" are a joke, and more so with mobiles.

So for that, I'll stick with my $240 SonyEriccson W300i. It plays MP3's, has 1Gb capacity, and I can develop software on it with MIDP. It looks like Apple threw a "Sony PSP" to the people, that is: good tech, overpriced, and devels unable to fully tap the device.

Ok, I tried it, Win XP

And... it cut off my comment. I was just saying i was using XP sp 1, it was ugly, but it worked. All the comment was in the text box, and i didn't click preview (idiot) just post. I guess I lied, it's ugly AND it DOESN'T work. $firefox++

Daniel Voyce wrote:

"How compliant is Safari? Are we talking Microsoft compliant or Firefox compliant?"

Definitely Firefox compliant. While Safari/Konqueror boast of passing the acid2 test, both they and Opera, another with acid2 credentials, have oddities that are head scratchers. They are still miles ahead of IE of any version.

Porting Safari to Windows is a Good Thing® for consumer choice and for developer testing.

cheers,

gary

Of course, even if you discount the browsers that share codebases with the more popular ones (EG Netscape/Camino or derived versions of NCSA Mozaic) there are always other forgotten gems that don't get the attention they deserve, like textmode browsers: lynx-like, links-like (especially elinks which is really quite advanced, nicely fast and has fairly decent javascript/ecmascript and CSS) or even, if what you need is not a browser but a retriever, curl, wget, fetch and all the rest.

Or, to hell with it - let's all go back to gopher and FTP. You never got the gopher browser or FTP program wars, did you? Yes! I'm going to see how long I can manage without a web browser, starting now! Oh, hang on a minute ...

Cheers,

Sabahattin

I went looking for the performance benchmarks listed by Apple on the Safari 3 Beta pages.

It appears they ceased being developed/supported last year (as of July 2006)

http://www.lionbridge.com/lionbridge/en-us/services/outsourced-testing/benchmark-software.htm

For the record, i downloaded this and tested it as part of my role.

It manages t ooccupy more space on screen than IE7, and looks terrible thanks to the apple style skin. (Man, is it ugly). It looks really bad on a low res screen. (17" LCD for the record") note the sample pictures are on a very high res screen.

I found the fonts unreadable at any setting, and agree with the general trend of comments that this is substandard for "beta" software.

Moreover, the so-called intuitive bookmark system occupies extra space on screen, and as no one i know uses itunes the layout was unfamiliar and unpleasant to use.

I am going to copy this text to their feedback too, so that they know.

but I'm still on Windows 2000 .... I wonder if it works on Wine .....

As said above, Safari is very standards complaint - something IE7 isn't exactly hot on.

I'm a web dev and develop pretty much exclusively on Safari, it's never crashed on me and i've only noticed a few oddities with layout... the fonts etc are much clearer and easier to read though so i'll stick with it.

I love the way people bark at a choice... you don't have to use FFS, use what you like. There are people out there (like me) who will use Safari, i use Firefox too as some of the third party add ons are great - most notably the Web Developer toolbar. I have a blanket ban on IE7 at my office, everyone uses Firefox, but the Macs all prefer to use Safari and i'm perfectly happy to allow that.

Well done Jean-Baptiste. I see your emotive twist on events has produced the rabid frothing at the mouth you were obviously aiming to evoke. Is that a sick twisted humor kind of thing?

For the record SJ didn't say anything about taking over Firefox market share, just to "try" and grow Safari's. But that doesn't sound very exciting does it, so stealing from Firefox is a much better spin on events.

As for the iPhone, yeah it's disappointing. I'd love to see Tomtom Navigator on it right now, and even more, OmniGroup's up and coming killer GTD app: OmniFocus. But I guess that Apple have their hands full entering a new market with new business partners, while readying their October push in the OS wars, and developing the next ramp up of their system portfolio to deal with the uncertainty of a real SDK for the iPhone right now. Apple are not omnipotent or omnipresent.

One thing we can all be sure of, Jean-Baptiste. Apple are smarter than you; are more patient, and have demonstrated of late that they know their customer base very well.

The iPhone is a new platform for Apple at the beginning of its life cycle. It'll develop over time, and an SDK is still a strong possibility. But only when Apple are sure they can do it right.

Oh Boy... Another successful product release for Apple. Put in the pile with Job's other stuff, Newton, The black box, original Mac, etc. etc etc. The only smart one was Wozniac who took the money and ran.