Safari for Windows, cool?
I’ve mostly had a big hate on for Safari, since we had to ensure our software worked with it just like all the other browsers, our client is very Mac centric. Needless to say, the hoops, that had to be jumped through to get a rather simple application to work, which I might add was working great under FireFox and IE were too many to mention and the real pain was that the code came out looking like a piece of shit with browser detection logic and all kinds of stupid html tricks in the forms. I wasn’t a happy camper.
At WWDC 2003 I had a colourful conversation with the head of Safari development (I don’t recall his name) and at that time I said why don’t you port safari to Windows, after all in those days it was IE or Netscape (at least I was using NS, but I don’t think too many other people were by then and Firefox wasn’t a household name yet) I’m glad to see they finally listened to me.
So far, Safari 3 seems pretty fast, I always liked how they incorporated the progress bar into the url field, that’s smart thinking and nice design. Safari 3 is compatible with our old Safari 2 version forms (a small yeah.) Finally I probably don’t have to run a virtual machine to boot linux so I can use Konqueror for browser testing anymore, very nice. (Safari is built on the festering bones of Konqueror)
We may have a new browser war, back to the future…