“The ability to download and immediately render non-standard web fonts is just one of several advancements Apple has planned for Safari 3.1, a small but significant update to its share-gaining web browser for both the Mac and Windows PCs. The release, which underwent private testing this week, will tie in a number of other enhancements, most of which have been under constant development as part of the company’s WebKit open source application framework since last fall. They aim to provide Web developers a means of writing more dynamic and customizable web pages and iPhone apps, which will in turn provide surfers with a more feature-rich and enjoyable experience.”
I wonder how much of an inroad Safari is making on the Windows platform.
I’ve got a mac, but never use Safari myself, so I wonder whether many people use Safari on windows at all.
I tried it.
But the whole can’t-use-accented-characters is a huge huge blow off, because in portuguese, there are all kinds of ~A! ~A ~A(c) ~Alb and so on.
Actually, Safari CAN show accented characters, what it does not do (either by choice or technical limitation) is not render windows specific characters. For instance, the character ‘~A(c)’ if attained via charmap (or a different language typeset keyboard) will use the windows character encoding directly. Most web browsers will be lenient when rendering these characters and show the correct ones anyway, but Safari does not (and neither does Firefox if you put it into Strict xhtml mode, etc).
Sure fire way to get those chars appearing is by using the html encoded character in it’s place:
< !ENTITY eacute CDATA “é” — latin small letter e with acute, U+00E9 ISOlat1 –>
If you view the source of my post, you’ll see that while I can render the char ‘~A(c)’, I have to use the html encoding to make it render in Safari.
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/sgml/entities.html
EDIT: ARG
OSAlert is garbaging all my hard work, even though their preview renders it correctly, the site escapes my html encoded stuff… just check out that link.
Edited 2008-02-07 18:30 UTC
The use of Windows-1252 encoding (and the other related ones) is perfectly valid, as long as it’s not served as latin1 (iso-8859-1) or similar. It’s this behaviour that’s not allowed in FF strict mode I suspect. To be honest though for 99% of sites the proper solution would be to move to UTF-8.
Besides that, Safari for Windows have terrible problems with accents. By using accents in web forms, it just ignores everything you wrote after the accent… not just forms, but and coping to clipboard to. Also, it didn’t properly converted the line breaks to the correct (in Windows), leaving you with a bunch of characters to clean up…
But as far as I know, most of the problems are gone in the current versions of Safari for Windows.
I do use it from time to time to check some links when my Opera9 or Firefox3 windows are too populated… Or when Flash video playback bug (just stop after some seconds, have to click the seek bar all the time to continue the playback for some more seconds… it just sucks) prevents me from watching them in my browsers.
I think the main goal for Safari on Windows is for iPhone development, even though Steve last year proclaimed it to be the fasted browser on Windows.
I rarely use Safari on my Mac; mainly Camino or Fireox for my needs. Of course, for website design/development, I do fire it up to make sure it displays fine.
For switchers, it makes sense that they would use the included browser and nothing else as that’s what they did on Windows. Not saying all switchers of course, but the general consumers who just browse the internet and check email.
I have safari loaded on my Windows PC but very rarely use it. It was loaded to try it out, now I only use it if I want to use something other than firefox for web browsing. I like to switch things around a bit, gets boring looking at the same application day in and day out. Safari doesn’t offer the features/add-ons I like in firefox.
I don’t care for Safari on Mac OS X or Windows but it’s available and it keeps things moving again. It’s also helped fuel other WebKit-enabled browsers.
No matter what Apple’s reasoning is, it keeps Microsoft, Mozilla, and Opera thinking and that’s always a good thing.
Hopefully, the few enhancements for Safari will spill over into Windows and create more of a following, just to keep complacency at a minimum.
I don’t know of any other browsers on Windows that has it…
I recommend these two:
Stealther:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1306
Distrust:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1559
and,
SecureBrowse
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5967
The last one takes a different approach but could give you some interesting levels of flexibility (has uses other than p0rn
).
PS: Apparently private browsing is planned for Firefox 3, check current status here:
http://wiki.mozilla.org/PrivateBrowsing#Current_Status
Edited 2008-02-07 21:52 UTC
I’m Loving It.
The competitors are so blazingly far ahead of Microsoft, it sad watching Microsoft flounder around with X-ENABLE-LOCK-IN metas.
The standards have been around for so long now, dragging one’s heels isn’t good enough anymore, the web has finally made it onto mobile devices in the right format, and Microsoft are thankfully, not the ones controlling the forward motion now.