Comments for Has Apple tripped up with Safari?

Ok, let me say this: I'm pretty sure Safari for Windows will be a hit, will push more people to Macs and Apple products and it's going to make surfing the Web more simple and easy than with other browsers. Why do I think that? Simple: The truth is most Windows users have always wanted Mac work style. Some more deeper than others but that is certainly true.

Regular people, at least in their homes, are looking more and more for an easy way of use of their computers in order to joy more with it instead of wrestling. Too much time leading with viruses and computer hangs or system slowlyness are just too much stress when you come from the job to your home.

See, I'm not saying it will destroy the IE, that's very difficult today since it comes with Windows as default, but it will grow a lot, you'll see as with iTunes. As iTunes, Safari is an Apple Troyan Horse, not a virus, but an intelligent strategy to show how easy, beautiful and powerful are Mac applications, unlike many think that Macs are just pretty and eyecandy but simple and short, which are not at all.

Parenthesis:
(See, for example, if Macs weren't good, and were simple and "toy computers", as some others say, and important product company as Adobe, for name just one, wouldn't waste time always making entire suites products for it, so don't came to me with the dumb 6% market share issue, that doesn't have sense at all. Macs are beast machines which work excellent and make money, not pretty toys. Sorry but a lot of people think in that way).

Ok, back again.

iTunes came to Windows firstly as the iPod manager and the Music Store, but, it has converted in a beast who destroy even Winamp, the most used music player. But how a big full screen software can beat a tiny and beautiful and great working one? Easy: With easy of use and better performance. Now, that will happen with Safari.

Safari is in beta and it works pretty bad by now, but why they give that to the public? Simple: They have to test it really well in order to make it better for the Windows world.

I'm confident that this first version of Safari for Windows wouldn't be a really good one. But I'm pretty sure in v4 or v5 IE and Firefox will be facing troubles. Apple want people to buy Apple products and by now they have learned really good how to do it, so Safari is a tool to get people as iTunes is too, so the effort to make it work excellent are top A+.

Most people are using IE not because it is the best browser, but because it comes with Windows, that helps a lot, BUT, this generation is using it 'cause this is the first Internet generation who barely have learned to use a computer. Most regular peoplen now doesn't know really well their machines and their OS and how it works at all. Now there are kids all over the world that are using computers since 4 and 5 years old when we where just playing with toys around the house at that age, and that generation who is growing now knows how computers work and which applications are better than others, and trust me, the best will prevail. IE will die little by little since it is bad, it is a bad interpreter and little by little will be pushed away and Apple and Firefox can benefit really big of that. In 10 years maybe IE will be 12% or 15% you'll see. Technology is like that.

The best will prevail.

When I watched the video for Steve Jobs' presentation at the Apple Developer's Conference I did not have the impression Safari was "beta". I had the impression is was ready to go. And, because I have become disenchanted with the MS pricing model for its operating systems, I was keen to try something Apple and see if I liked it. So, I downloaded the evening after it was announced. I though web pages looked fuzzy. I could not see that it had imported my bookmarks and it did not recognize the windows style of bookmarks when I tried to import them. More importantly, it crashed within a few minutes. I started it up and went to apple.com, where it would not play the Quicktimes files and where it crashed. I uninstalled it. The next day I read about the security holes and I was thankful I had not wandered far off my beaten track with the browser. I ended up concluding that if I did buy a Mac, I would just use Firefox as a bropwser because Safari did not seem to work.

Middle click: no, Mac users don't do this. What does it do? As far as I can tell from the article it has something to do with scrolling. So what does it do, that Page Up/Down, spacebar, or scroll wheeling don't?

Ctrl-Mousewheel: Try the View menu. On the Mac Cmd-+ and Cmd-- make text larger or smaller. all from the keyboard. I'd guess the Windows version uses Ctrl or Alt or something instead of the command key.

Window resizing: How often do you resize your browser windows? (And why?) Maybe I'm in the minority, but I find a 10px by 10px target much easier than a 1-pixel-wide line anyway.

Text anti-aliasing: Who knows, maybe Windows does have a better algorithm. OS X has had it for years, though. And to my eyes, at least, Apple's version looks darker and more readable. The Windows text looks like a "light" font. Or like it's gray rather than black text.

Yes, Safari lets you change the font size. I'm leaning lazily back in my chair after hitting apple-plus a couple times.

What the Windows keystroke is, I dunno. view->make text bigger, view->make text smaller, view->make text normal size.

If they ported the whole toolbar management you should also be able to right-click on the toolbar and drag the text size buttons in, or do view->customize toolbar.

Hugo, Alpha and Beta labels are used not as stages of how buggy a software is but to denote the development progress of it. Alpha software is not feature complete, Beta software has most of its features complete, maybe a few minor additions can be provided later in the cycle but for the most part there will not be additions. Beta means that the features created are still far from being completely tested. In this regard Safari is beta since there will not be major features added. If you had the chance to test other beta softwares that were more stable or complete that means only that the developer decided to release a late beta. Beta software is expected to be buggy, very buggy. I'm writing this with Safari on MacIntel, I've been using 3.0 beta since it was released and I use it for 14 hours a day with multiple tabs open, flash, QT and php development and it's working much more smoothly than Firefox. I used to use Firefox only but the smoothness and speed of Safari has impressed me enough to switch to it as my default browser. From my point of view this beta is very solid. If you have the chance to test it on Mac OS do yourself a favor and enable the debug menu and try the "Web Inspector", hopefully they will bring that to Windows too and when they do a lot of people will appreciate the value of this program.
And yes, I resized the text box to write this text and it felt good :)

Wow, you're WAY too kind to Safari, Oli. Safari runs painfully slowly. The fuzzy fonts look like they've been hand-carved out of pig's livers. It crashes -- when's the last time you remember Firefox or IE crashing? It can't do most of what FireFox can do. It is tough to resize the window -- you have to remember to go to the corner. Changing the font size is awkward, and the result looks like garbage anyway. And try getting it to do stuff like FTP. Can't be done, as far as I can tell. Take a hike, Safari. Bleccchh. I played with it for a couple of hours then wiped it. What a joke.