‘Twas Brillig*

Well, I’ve installed Safari for Windows and I thought I might as well record my thoughts. As Joel Spolsky says, it does seem to take a while for the application to initially load and the fonts do at first seem blurry, but loading times do get better and being a font whore (ever since reading Donald Knuth’s MetaFont book back in the summer of 1990) I think I approve of the reasons why the fonts look the way they do and could easily get used to it.

It is a bit odd that like a Windows 95 application it installs straight into the root of the “All Programs” folder and not as per current windows style guidelines into a sub directory (e.g. “Apple Safari”) - even Microsoft Office now does this correctly - and the fact that I’m now running something with a UI that looks extremely Mac-like is particularly odd (the only obvious difference I can see from a mac is the menu bar is within the app). So far (and I’ve only used it for an hour or so) there is one feature which other browsers should (ahem, cough) borrow and that is all text areas are resizeable - quite frankly brilliant. I’m also fairly impressed that, with the exception of a popup calendar, the web application I work on works (yay! for attempting to be standards compliant).

The announcement of Safari for Windows is something I wasn’t expecting and I can’t work out if it is a good thing or not. I dislike Internet Explorer and am happy about the inroads that Firefox has made into marketshare, but can’t help feeling that without a huge advertising campaign another browser is just going to occupy the same kind of niche position opera or, even worse, flock (a browser I like, but with a core which will always be playing catchup with firefox) has.

I guess if one good thing comes out of it (and assuming it has the same rendering engine) people might actually test their websites on it and keep Mac users happy.