Yay!! I didn’t believe it when I first heard it, but apple has released a public beta of the soon-to-be Windows version of Safari.
First impressions are really quite good, here are a few of the highlights:
Quartz font rendering.
It just looks sweet, using the same font rendering as available on OS X. I love my fonts, and I love seeing them displayed without the hinting (that modifies the shape of the letters to better fit the pixels) combined with the secret sauce that manages to make things not too blury.
Aqua widgets
Rather than go through the rather lengthy process of porting the application to an alternate toolkit, Apple ported their toolkit to Windows, which is good “˜cause it means us Microsoft ppl can get a bit of a taste of the Mac world.
Thin Borders
I know it sounds lame, but one of the things I love about Macs is the way that everything is presented on the screen. The application just sits there with no borders; you just use the resize option at the bottom-left of the window to do the needful. Vista on the other hand looks terrible, with great chunky borders that attempt to show off how well the glass theme works. As a result, the shadows don’t seem to make the windows float like they should, it’s a small thing I know, but it’s the small things that make a big difference.
We can test!
Being a fan of accessibility and cross-browser compatibility, I am really really happy that this is happening. I can actually see how the site will look on a Mac! That is complete with the same font rendering, DPI settings, etc. It’s really handy.
The frustrating things:
I can’t get it to work on my machine at work.
I think I must have had some dodgy version of the “Lucida Grande” font that has caused Safari to start off without any text being displayed. Kind of a downer. I have attempted to replace these problematic fonts with the correct ones, but I have still had no success. I hope Apple will be able to do something about this “˜cause I am keen to use it.
My laptop touchpad scroll doesn’t work
Which is rather annoying. I assume it has something to do with the lack of integration with the underlying OS, both a good and a bad thing I guess.
We will potentially have another browser that we need to support.
Yeah, I know that I said it’s great to able to test on a new browser, but it will be a pain when we can no longer say “well, it’s not perfect on Safari, but that’s only 1.5% of the market so that’s acceptable”. I do think that the browser share will increase considerably with this move to be something more significant, and that will mean another Javascript DOM to accommodate for and another set of CSS curiosities to consider.
Download the beta here: http://www.apple.com/safari/
