Safari on Windows

[jason]

I came across this in a blog post yesterday. Apple has released a beta version of its flagship web browser, Safari, for Windows. You can download it at http://www.apple.com/safari/.

I downloaded it this morning to try out. Let me warn you that this is an early beta and it is quite buggy. For me, I was unable to do anything with the program because no fonts would display on web pages or the UI. Google revealed that fonds are the Achilles heal of WinSafari right now--many people report the same problem I'm having, others see their menus with garbled labels. Using one published workaround I was able to get fonts to display on the page, but still nothing in the UI.

Despite not doing much of anything, the beta appears to be quite fast and Apple kept the same clean interface they use on the Mac version. Working in an environment that is nearly 50/50 PC/Mac I can see having Safari installed on my Windows machine being a good thing testing-wise, especially if it closely mimics the behavior of its Mac sister. I doubt it will replace Firefox as my primary browser, though--I rely on far too many Firefox extensions to give it up.

[Gwaihir]

I can see having Safari installed on my Windows machine being a good thing testing-wise, especially if it closely mimics the behavior of its Mac sister.

Exactly, that's the primairy use I see for it as well.

At this time it is far from advisable to use it as you main browser anyway, as there are likely to be truly dangerous security leaks in the thing still. Apple found a good way to get people to report those though: they claim it to be 'secure from day one', which in turn motivated lots of folks to find fault with it within that day. And they did: no less than six serious flaws were reported the first day the beta went public .

[JonathanB]

Yesterday, Apple released an update (Safari beta version 3.01) that addresses the security venerabilities:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,13...s/article.html

Keep in mind, it IS still a beta version.

I'm going to let other people play around with the beta, but I'm looking forward to the final release, to use for testing.

[Gwaihir]

Fixed half of those, actually (3 out of 6). But indeed the point remains that it IS a beta version (and from a manufacturer with relatively litte experience in this particular field). So download it to review it, not (yet) for daily use.