Safari On Windows

Safari For Windows

In a brief moment between projects today, I had a glance at the beeb’s RSS feed, only to see “Apple announces Windows browser”. So on I click, assuming I’ll see some roadmap for a Safari Windows port as has been rumoured on and off for years. But No! No roadmap, but a full public beta.

Is it surprising that they have ported it? No, it’s been rumoured for a while, and frankly anything that makes the Windows user more comfortable with Mac UI design will ease transitions. Well, that’s as maybe, but what surprised me about this was that it was done totally by stealth. I am a bit of a news junkie, and always keep up to date with a huge range of tech site news – /., el Reg, and more frivolous ones – boingboing, digg etc. I haven’t even heard a rumour of this until it drops on the BBC (via Jobs at a SanFran apple dev. conference).

Why do I care that they did a stealth release? Well, essentially no matter how well coded a browser is, there’s always its own little quirks. As a webdeveloper, it helps to know the quirks for all browsers above a ~1% market share. The more browsers, the more competition which is great, but I prefer to pick up their idiosyncrasies as they gradually gain mindshare. Firefox was a good example, Opera has always been around, and now that Ubuntu is pushing forward on the desktop, it’s worth taking a look at whether that has issues (Media integration with Firefox being one).

With this release though, there’s a certain instant Mac fanbase trapped at work on Windows PCs who will jump at it. Then there’s the inevitable… Jobs is a great marketer, so he wants a good marketshare what does he do? Integrate some minor part of iTunes into Safari, and BLAM. 5-10% marketshare from the iPod fanboi contingent.

First in my line of weird quirks?
For some reason unbeknownst to me, the default font that Safari chooses is a rather illegible “Brady Bunch” font from the depth of my font repository.

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Tags: browsers, fonts, Safari