Safari on Windows, Leopard Debut at WWDC

comm2k writes to mention that Apple has announced a Windows version of Safari along with Leopard, the new version of Mac OS X at this years World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco. "He said Safari was 'the fastest browser on Windows', saying it was twice as fast as Internet Explorer. A test version of Safari for Windows XP and for Vista is available for download from the Apple website. Apple is hoping to replicate the success of iTunes, which has proved enormously popular on both Macs and Windows machines."

All of the major news

[daveschroeder]

* Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) [apple.com] - ...of course. This was the main focus of the keynote. A "feature complete" version of Leopard was demonstrated, and all WWDC attendees receive the current, feature complete beta of Leopard and Leopard Server. Demos, movies, and more information about all of the many new features are available here [apple.com]. No one outside of the conference will receive these builds (but can be expected to receive later seeds). Leopard is still on track to ship in October. Leopard is $129, or $69 edu/govt (as usual). Free/cheap upgrades to Leopard will likely only for hardware purchased within month prior to its release (also as usual). (See also Leopard Server [apple.com]).

Mac OS X [apple.com] and Mac OS X Server [apple.com] press releases with more info.

* iPhone third party development - iPhone [apple.com], previously thought to be completely closed, will have development possible via rich "Web 2.0" applications. Details on this are a little sketchy, and it's not what some hoping for a full iPhone SDK wanted, but it appears that all external app development will happen via web apps. However, it also appears such apps will appear as and have the look and feel of other iPhone apps. While this is news, it appears analysts are interpreting this as "new bad news", even though there was no expectation previously that iPhone would be an open platform, since it appeared that it would be closed, and this announcement is actually a positive development over the previous situation. iPhone is also still in schedule to ship on June 29 at 6pm via Apple retail stores and AT&T corporate stores. Still no news on specifics for online sales, preordering, etc.

Press release with more info [apple.com].

* Safari Mac OS X and Windows [apple.com] - Safari is now available, in its 3.0 beta form, on Mac OS X 10.4.9 and Windows XP/Vista. At first glance, Safari is much, much faster than it was previously on Mac OS X, and includes a range of new features. This is the same version of Safari that will ship on Leopard and (essentially) iPhone. Safari is now also available on Windows; this is obviously going to be used as a channel of development for iPhone, since all external iPhone apps will essentially be Safari web apps.

Press release with more info [apple.com].

* No new hardware, but the Apple Store and the rest of the Apple web site has a new look (which was why the Apple Store was down, which some see as an indication of new hardware announcements).

* Keynote summary [macrumorslive.com]

* Keynote archive will be available later today here [apple.com].

It's in beta

[doubleofive]

I've already crashed Safari on Windows three times, but I was being pretty hard on it. You have to remember that this is still beta before you start bashing it, though.

Re:All of the major news

[vinceb]

I can't believe they skipped the opportunity to implement url bar keyword searching... until they do, it's Camino for me.

Already done

[daveschroeder]

Safari has always been based on KDE's KHTML, and they do contribute back to the community via the WebKit project [webkit.org].

See also:

KDE adds Safari feel to desktop Linux [zdnet.com] - The KDE Project has released a significant update to its K Desktop Environment software that includes refinements to the Konqueror Web browser derived from collaboration with Apple's Safari browser team.

KDE's Konqueror Browser Reaps Safari Benefits [macslash.org] - In a perfect example of how open source and proprietary software can benefit each other, Apple got a significant headstart by basing Safari on established technologies like KHTML & Konqueror. And in return, Apple's contributions back to the open source community have benefitted Konqueror.

O...

[daveschroeder]

...RLY? [webkit.org]

To Site Devs...

[daeg]

To those site developers that are having issues with Safari on Windows, you can enable the Safari Debug tools like you can on Mac. On OS X you would do:

defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

in a Terminal window. Obviously that command does not work on Windows.

Instead, open %APPDATA%\Apple Computer\Safari\Preferences.plist in your favorite text editor. Add:

<key>IncludeDebugMenu</key>
<true/>

and save it. Restart Safari. You now have a nifty "Debug" menu in the top menu bar, complete with the Javascript Console.

Re:Open Letter

[Niten]

I wouldn't necessarily call it "hacking" for Safari, considering that Safari's KHTML-based rendering engine is more standards compliant than either Firefox or IE.

Crashed/locked up on me too.

[jasenj1]

It's locked up (CPU consumption at 95%+ for a long time with nothing to show) on me a few times already and that's without stress testing.

I'm behind a corporate firewall, and while I can browse external sites I can't get to any internal servers. Sounds like a bug in the proxy handling.

Also, the edge window size controls don't show up.

- Jasen.

Re:font weirdness?

[Dynedain]

That's because instead of using the built-in Windows font smoothing (eg. ClearType) they decided to implement some bastardized version of the OSX font smoothing. The font smoothing on OSX is very nice, but Safari on Windows looks like crap! I would much prefer to use the built in font smoothing on Windows (like Firefox does).

Re:KDE / Konqueror

[ciroknight]

It's been based on KHTML/Konq since conception. If you want to use Safari (or its equivalence in Linux), just use Konq.

The only reason it runs on Windows now is because Adobe put a shit-ton of work into WebKit/WebCore to make their Apollo product, and now Apple's using the benefit of their partial-Carbon port to port Safari over and use the Win32-ized WebKit to power it.

The real good thing that's happening in WebKit/WebCore right now is the work going on to make it work with GTK+/GDK. Once that happens we'll have a web browser that looks and feels native to every major UI toolkit out there.

Re:THAT is Steve Jobs's "one more thing"?

[daveschroeder]

This is WWDC. It is a developer conference, not a consumer conference. Its focus has always been software (although WWDC has occasionally been the forum for hardware announcements). Apple is doing more and more product introductions as they're ready (e.g., like last week's new MacBook Pro introduction), and less and less product introductions at conferences and "special events".

Everyone expecting brushed aluminum iMacs and new Cinema Displays shouldn't have expected that in the first place. And an Apple-branded virtualization solution? It's been known since last WWDC that Leopard wouldn't have integrated virtualization. With three [parallels.com] different [vmware.com] solutions [virtualbox.org] already existing, plus Boot Camp, why would you even expect that, no matter how nice it would be?

And who would care about this announcement? This isn't just "Safari for Windows". Jeez. It's the channel for development for iPhone, since all of iPhone's third-party development will be as Safari web apps [apple.com].

Re:Open Letter

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Screw Safari, I never hacked for it and I don't want to start. Hacking for IE is bad enough.

You have to "hack" to get IE to work. If you code to standards, generally Safari, Firefox, Opera, Konquerer, etc. all just work. We've found a few Safari specific bugs here, but all of them turned out to be bugs in our HTML, which were just handled a little better by Firefox.

Re:Safari...?

[Niten]

Safari renders just fine –it's certainly more in line with the official specs than any other browser out there, with the possible exception of Opera. The problem is simply that Safari doesn't have Firefox's market share yet, so web developers who code all their sites with Firefox and IE in mind don't necessarily check to make sure they work well in Safari too.

It's the same problem that we used to have with the old Mozilla Suite. Gecko has, for the most part, always been great; but it wasn't until more developers got on board that using Mozilla or Firefox as a daily web browser became a pleasant experience. If anything, the problem that Safari currently faces in this regard is much less significant than the hurdle Mozilla originally had to jump.

YellowBox for Windows is Back

[bill_mcgonigle]

No, Apple is not trying to replicate iTunes' success.

Agreed - the browser marketshare thing is just a front for getting millions of people to beta test their application development framework - YellowBox for Windows is back [bfccomputing.com]. Next year you can have real applications on the iPhone (and Mac, and Windows).

Re:No, they aren't

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

No, Apple is not trying to replicate iTunes' success.

I think you're more right than you know. I think Apple is trying to replicate the iPod's success. They used iTunes to help sell the iPod to Windows users. I think they're porting Safari to try to help sell the iPhone to Windows users. The iPhone is running OS X and a version of Safari. It runs Web 2.0 applications in Safari. This release means Windows developers don't need OS X in order to develop and test for the iPhone. It also makes testing for Safari easier for Windows only Web developers.

Personally, I bounce back and forth between Firefox and Safari. Safari is faster and has some really nice features (support for services). Safari 3 has some things to offer too. I'm using it right now and the ability to just resize this text field kicks ass. I hope every other browser steals the idea. The Web inspector is nice too.

Re:All of the major news

[mr100percent]

EA announced at the WWDC that they will be porting games over to the Mac, and having simultaneous releases from here on.

Re:font weirdness?

[Tickletaint]

To be fair, Firefox renders text like shit [zeldman.com] on OS X, compared with Safari or any native Mac application.

Re:Safari is the iPhone SDK

[lurch_mojoff]

BTW, Google apps already work with Safari 3 (well, there probably are bugs and glitches, but they generally work).

Differences between Windows and OS X Safari

[Anonymous Coward]

I've just finished playing with both betas and here are the differences I've seen so far.

General Preferences: New default search engine option. It does not have the Open "safe" files after downloading option found in the OSX version..

Appearance Preferences: Font smoothing option. (This option is a standard system preference under OSX)

Bookmarks Preferences: Non of the "Address Book" bookmark options are available. No option to synchronize bookmarks using .Mac. I'm actually surprised at the lack of this option.

Tab preferences: The same except for the key names. Ctrl instead of command. Alt instead of option.

Advanced preferences: Proxies option is grayed out.

No Safari application menu. "Quit" moved to File Menu and renamed "Exit"; "Private Browsing...", "Reset Safari...", "Empty Cache...", "Block Pop-Up Windows", and "Preferences..." moved to Edit menu; "About Safari", and "Report Bugs to Apple..." moved to the Help menu.

File Menu: Missing "Mail Contents of This Page", new "Print Preview" option (in OSX this is part of the Print dialog.), "Save As..." does not have a shortcut key.

Edit Menu: Shortcut added to "Delete"; Shortcuts changed for '"Find Again", "Find Previous" and "Hide Find Banner".

View Menu: Many of the Text Encodings available in the OS X are not included. 25 under Windows, 37 under OSX.

History: Not sure if this is changed or not. OSX Window offers date sub menus such as "Earlier today...". Have not used the Windows version long enough to see if they appear.

Help: Shortcut for help changed to F1

User Agent under Windows beta: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en) AppleWebKit/522.11.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Safari/522.11.3
User Agent under OS X beta: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/522.10.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Safari/522.11

Re:SVG, hooray!

[jasenj1]

Agreed. I messed around with SVG about 5 years ago. I keep hoping it'll break into the mainstream. Maybe Safari 3.0 and the iPhone can help make that happen.

- Jasen.

Safari 3 on Windows: First Impressions

[Llywelyn]

- Nice smooth interface, takes up less space than Firefox.
- Definitely beta software. I get occasional and sporadic crashes. These are not currently consistently repeatable.
- Font rendering is nice, including Unicode characters.
- Unicode characters that I have fonts for no longer display as boxes in the title bar (they still do in Firefox).
- Transitioning to pages sometimes takes significantly longer than it should. It will stall before loading the page.

Re:I agree 100%

[Cygfrydd]

It’s amazing how when Microsoft programs something for the Mac platform, it always ends up being the best, but when Apple programs something for Windows, it ends up always being the worst.

I’d definitely have to disagree with the assessment that Microsoft apps for the Mac are “the best;” that may well have been true in the past, but the current incarnation of Office for Mac is, without a doubt, the most bloated and ridiculously clunky ‘productivity suite’ I’ve ever had the misfortune of trying to use. Besides sucking memory like a hungry newborn, it has consistantly shown buggy formatting both in Word and in Excel.

... I use Office 2003 under Win2k in Parallels now.

@yg

Re:KDE / Konqueror

[ciroknight]

It's in svn, check it out, read through it, commit some code. It's getting further and further along every single time I check up on it.

The GTK+ bindings for WebKit will enable WebKit to run in GNOME; of course you'd need to write a complete browser (or find a way to hack it into Galeon or Epiphany), but because the generic widget-set in WebKit can be re-implemented with just about any widget toolkit you want (WxWidgets, GTK+, Qt, etc), it makes the engine extremely generic (which is the greatest thing about WebKit).

The Carbon port is what allows Safari (a Carbonized app) to run in Windows. Think Safari:Firefox::WebKit:Gecko.

So you totally missed.....

[NDPTAL85]

....the part where Steve said that Safari is the SDK for iPhone apps didn't you?

(^_^)

Re:Ultimate server version? Family pack?

[Psykechan]

Actually, they will have at least 3 seperate versions not even including the educational discounts or other such promotions. This is based on the current 10.4 prices.

OS X Leopard 10.5 - $129
OS X Leopard 10.5 Family Pack - $199
OS X Server 10.5 - $499 and up

They could prove me wrong and implement all of the server niceities into the consumer version and grant a new license that allows you to install on any systems you own but I seriously doubt that will happen. I'm fairly certain that when I upgrade to the Ultimate version that it will cost more than $129.

Not XP and Vista only!

[swid27]

Despite what Apple's Web site says, it installs on Windows 2000 just fine.

Hell, I'm typing this response in Safari 3 on Windows 2000.

Re:Safari is no good on OS X 10.4 - windows?

[TheRaven64]

Mail.app shows the URL of the link in the tooltip if you hover the mouse. Safari shows it in the status bar, which you can show or hide be hitting command-/, or looking in the 'view' menu.

I am not trying to troll here

I'm not convinced...

Re:KDE / Konqueror

[Anonymous Coward]

Point me to the place on Apple's Developer Connection where I can download the Cocoa Frameworks for Win32... He was talking about the win32 Carbon port because that's what they probably used to make Safari for windows, rather than port all of Carbon to Win32. It makes the most sense.

Now I know that they have stated in the past that they want to bring things like CoreFoundation and the Cocoa frameworks to all platforms (e.g. Linux and Windows at least, maybe BSD), but unless you have inside knowledge that they are complete/stable enough to port a production app on, then I would rather believe that they ported Safari to Carbon for the Windows XP/Vista versions.

Re:All of the major news

[iluvcapra]

What I mean is, the World Of Warcraft is a true multiplatform, OpenGL game. The EA stuff will probably be Windows .exe files tailored to run under OS X.

Mac OS X cannot run .exe files. If you want your program to run on OS X, without requiring the end user buying Parallels or Wine, you will be packaging your executable in a .app directory like the rest of us.

They can't be TOO windows-ish, as very few video cards on Macs support DirectX 9 or whatever games are now, and Macs don't ship with any Windows libraries. But since EA has written for so many different platforms as it is (Windows, Xbox 1 and 2, PS1,2,3, all manner of Nintendos) their games are probably written meta enough that they can be adapted without too much difficulty.

Re:To Site Devs...

[iluvcapra]

Also add, if you right-click on any element in a WebKit view with the debug on, you will get the extremely good element inspector for the element you're on.

Re:All of the major news

[jacobw]

he means being able to type things like 'wp slashdot' to go to the wikipedia slashdot page. It's incredibly useful and is one of the reasons I can't even consider using safari in real life.

If that's all that's holding you back, just install Saft [dnsalias.com]. Works like a charm, and has a ton of other useful features.

Re:Already done

[Ant P.]

If I remember correctly, Apple's "contributions" back to KDE were in the form of an undocumented 11MB .patch file.

Re:O...

[Sparks23]

Not to mention that aside from WebKit, which the parent poster points to, or the zeroconf standard (which Apple helped to write), they've also contributed a lot of code to another open source project in particular. It's called the GNU Compiler Collection [gnu.org], or GCC for short. You might have seen it around on a Linux box or two, even. ;)

Re:All of the major news

[he-sk]

Others have already mentioned SafariStand and Saft that provide that functionality. I use AcidSearch [pozytron.com], which is Free Software.

Re:All of the major news

[greenstrat]

Safari 3.0 for Windows passes Acid2 test, just FYI.

Control-L is the new Alt-D

[Foerstner]

Works in IE, Firefox, Safari...L as in Location.

Command-L on the Mac.

Re:Already done

[frogstar_robot]

There was a lot of back and forth and Apple has improved their interaction with the KHTML devs. Apple has since made the Giant Patch of Doom available in a CVS repository and have been a bit more helpful and where and what they changed and why. It's probably not perfect according most FOSS project standards but it is better than the picture you paint.

Re:Open Letter

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't get iTunes without QuickTime because iTunes uses QuickTime to play files. You can, however, get QuickTime without iTunes. It's really easy. There's a big radio button that says "QuickTime 7.1.6 with iTunes for Windows 2000/XP" and a second that says "QuickTime 7.1.6 for Windows 2000/XP". Before that, there was a big link that said "QuickTime Standalone Player" to download QuickTime without iTunes.

Don't blame Apple just because you can't be bothered to read.

Re:A Kick In The Balls For Microsoft

[earthbound kid]

In Safari, you don't type ctrl-enter to type www.*.com. You just type the name of the website and Safari is smart enough to figure out that you wanted .com on it's own.

Re:I agree 100%

[Anonymous Coward]

You think Office 98 was bad? You must have not been old enough to suffer Word/Excel 6 for the Mac.

Re:Open Letter

[laffer1]

Apple implemented a wrapper around the original qt/kde code when they ported khtml to the Mac. Who's to say they didn't do the same with the Windows version? Besides, if you install WebObjects 5.2 on Windows, you'll see that there is a lot of supporting crap for that old stuff. I don't see that stuff in the Safari install.

If you are correct, then Apple is ready to give up on the computer business. Windows developers have .NET and Java already. They don't need anything else. Plus, if they really want to use cocoa like code, they can always run GNUstep.

Re:Adblocking? ==SafariBlock

[donstenk72]

For adblocking on Safari have a look at the free add-on SafariBlock http://fsbsoftware.com/SafariBlock.html [fsbsoftware.com]

Re:Meh

[stephentyrone]

Obviously companies cook their own benchmarks, so it's very possible that they chose bits of javascript which Safari handles particularly well. But they at least have acknowledged Opera as another option, and there's at least some evidence that Safari may perform better than it.

It's not Apple's benchmark to cook. From the site you link to:

Performance measured in seconds. Testing conducted by Apple in June 2007 on a 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo-based iMac system running Windows XP Professional SP2, configured with 1GB of RAM and an ATI Radeon X1600 with 128MB of VRAM. HTML and JavaScript benchmarks based on VeriTest's iBench Version 5.0 using default settings.

Re:Open Letter

[prockcore]

considering that Safari's KHTML-based rendering engine is more standards compliant than either Firefox or IE.

Webkit started on KHTML, but they've changed it a LOT.

You can check the CSS selectors test [css3.info].
Safari passes 299/513 tests, firefox passes 314/513, konqueror passes 508/513.

That shows you how far Apple has drifted from KHTML.

Re:All of the major news

[zdzichu]

It is not feature complete. ZFS support is read-only [opensolaris.org].

Re:All of the major news

[dbrutus]

Transgaming's website currently has the EA announcement on their home page. They explicitly say that their engine will be used.

The history of these sorts of ports has been very bad for gaming houses that have tried them. Sales have been disappointing as the Apple crowd historically have turned their noses up at them. We'll see if there's going to be a repeat.