Apple Safari 3.0 (Beta) Browser for Windows
There really wasn't much new news offered up by Apple CEO Steve Jobs during his WWDC (World Wide Developer Conference) keynote this morning. In fact, I suspect that is why Apple's stock dropped a whopping $4.30/share (3.45%) . You can see the stock suddenly drop around 2:30PM EDT. Jobs' famous (and now expected) one more thing... announcement caught me off guard though: He announced that a beta release for Apple's Safari 3 web browser is available for Microsoft Windows XP and Vista.
I downloaded a copy and installed it on a desktop PC running Windows Vista Ultimate Edition. You can see a full screen shot of it above. Although this beta browser release seems to work find, it is interesting that while Apple insists on software developers following UI guidelines, they themselves broke a few for this Safari Windows port. The most obvious one is the lack of a grab-able frame for resizing. Safari for Windows follows the Apple UI convention of only allowing resizing by grabbing the bottom right corner of the window frame rather than any side or corner. As a side-effect of this design choice, Safari for Windows does not have a thin surround frame around its four sides.
The minimize/maximize/close buttons in the upper right corner are also significantly smaller (about half the size) as the buttons are on other application windows.
Safari does not support using Ctrl-T to open a new empty tab/window as other browsers do (notably IE and Firefox for Windows).
That said, Safari for Windows looks like a clean usable interface design. I'm using it right now to compose this blog entry. It's always good to have choices. So, I'm looking forward to learning what advantages Safari for Windows might offer over IE and Firefox.
UPDATE: Well, it didn't take long for security holes to be found in the Safari Windows beta release. Here's an item from CNet's News.com Blog: Security researchers: Safari for Windows not so secure.
I tried it and didn't really
I tried it and didn't really like it. Firefox works so well that most Mac users use it in place of Safari. I do, however, wonder if this could be a first step to porting OS X to the PC...
Johnathan
Ctrl+t works fine on my
Ctrl+t works fine on my install of Safari on XP to open a new tab as it does on Firefox. If anyone has any idea what Ctrl+T does on Firefox I'd be interested to know - it does something but I can't work out the logic of it :¬)
Honestly, I'm not sure what
Honestly, I'm not sure what they're thinking. I don't even use Safari on my Mac (I strongly prefer Camino) and I doubt Safari for Windows will render pages enough like Safari for Mac to make it useful for web development, so I guess I just don't see the point. Why not get those Apple engineers working on an enthusiast desktop machine to sit between the iMac and the Cheese Grater so those of us who really know tech stuff can have an expandable, supportable hardware platform without dropping $4K for over-the-top excess?
I have quite a few problems
I have quite a few problems with it atm, but its good that Apple are finally working on this, a lot of people have wanted it since Safari was released for OS X! I look forward to seeing future updates of the program.