Congrats to the Safari/WebKit team on achieving this milestone!

The latest WebKit nightly successfully passes the Acid3 test with a score of 100/100. I was truly impressed by the series of progress updates on the WebKit blog as the developers feverishly worked on squashing the last handful of bugs.

So what’s the landscape looking like in the rest of browser-land?

• An internal build of Opera also passed the test today, but it’s not yet available to the public. Kudos to the Opera devs on a job well done!
• Firefox (Gecko) should be next in line, but don’t expect to see the changes in the upcoming 3.0 release. Too bad.
• And Internet Explorer 8? I wouldn’t keep my hopes up…

Tags: apple, browsers, firefox, ie, microsoft, opera, safari

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There’s been a lot of chatter recently about the “BSoD” icon that Apple uses to represent networked Windows machines in Mac OS X Leopard. The whole situation becomes all the more amusing when you stumble upon this article within Apple’s support pages, describing Leopard’s 301st new feature - a BSoD of its own.

When it really comes down to it, can any OS vendor claim to have a product that’s 100% stable and reliable? Of course not. The bottom line is…

Tags: apple, humor, linux, mac, microsoft, windows

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Engadget has posted what I would consider to be the most comprehensive and balanced review of the iPhone I have seen on the web so far (and believe me, I’ve read lots of them during the last week). If you have any interest in the iPhone at all, you owe it to yourself to go through this three-part piece that examines just about every aspect of the device’s design and functionality.

I, myself, visited the local Apple store this weekend, where I had a chance to briefly play around with an iPhone demo unit. I was going to publish a rather detailed post with my thoughts, but now there isn’t really much I can add here that isn’t already in the aforementioned review; in fact, I found myself agreeing with almost everything in there.

What I will say is that I think the device met the expectations that I had for it going in. For better or for worse, I’ve always been more of a functionality-over-form kind of person, so while I really do believe that the iPhone is a beautiful piece of engineering with the slickest UI I’ve seen on a mobile device yet, I simply can’t ignore all the shortcomings like many others can. I could live with a software keyboard if I had to, and I could give up 3G for a slower EDGE connection too, but there’s still so much missing from the iPhone that we have come to take for granted on our Symbian, Windows Mobile and Blackberry smartphones.

If I had to sum up my thoughts in one sentence, I’d say the iPhone is a fantastic iPod, a great mobile browsing unit, a decent phone, and a rather poor productivity device, but one that brings them all together in a refreshingly appealing way.

What do you think?

Related Posts: Apple iPhone: Not Quite Flawless…

Tags: apple, iphone, mobile

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Joel Spolsky has an interesting post today about the differences in the way Microsoft and Apple choose to render on-screen fonts, and some of the possible reasons why these differences might exist.

Clearly, it seems like there’s no “right way” and what we tend to prefer is just that - a preference.

Tags: apple, cleartype, fonts, microsoft, typography

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In yesterday’s post, I wrote:

If you thought iTunes and QuickTime looked out of place in Windows, wait till you see this thing; it’s like Apple ripped Safari out of OS X, added a menu bar to the top, and called it a Windows app. Textboxes, buttons, radio buttons, checkboxes…they all use the bubbly Aqua style. I guess this wouldn’t be so bad if it were 2004 and we were all skinning XP to look like OS X, but can we get something more native, please? Probably unlikely, but one can always hope.

And there’s a reason why I said a more native interface is unlikely, even after the browser leaves the beta stage - it’s because I’m almost certain that the OS X look-and-feel was actually preserved intentionally.

Think about it. There’s good reason why Apple made the decision to release Safari for Windows. Jeff Atwood spells it out in a follow-up comment to his original post.

Safari is unapologetically a Mac app and does almost nothing the “Windows way”, with the possible exception of maximizing behavior.

I think this is absolutely by design. You have to understand that Safari isn’t so much a pretender to the IE/Firefox throne as it is a *Mac Emulator*. It’s intended to facilitate development of Safari compatible web apps (and technically iPhone apps) by making them dead simple to test. You no longer even have to beg, borrow, or steal a Mac to see if your web app behaves under Safari. Just download and go.

So from that perspective– and I can’t think of any others that make any business sense– the closer Safari’s behavior is to the Mac version, the better.

There you have it. Making the Windows version of Safari almost identical to its Mac counterpart is actually beneficial for development testing, which is undoubtedly the primary reason why Apple is bestowing Safari upon the Windows world.

End-users on Windows are surely not going to be happy about this, just as Mac users dislike the way Firefox paints non-native widgets on OS X, but that’s the way its likely to stay. Perhaps a team of enterprising individuals might spin off a project to build a WebKit-based Windows browser that fits in better, similar to what Camino does with Mozilla’s Gecko, but it’ll take a long time before something like that reaches the level of maturity that other mainstream browsers on Windows have achieved by now. Swift, for instance, is still far from really being usable.

P.S. If you like the textarea resizing feature in the Safari beta, you might want to try the Resizeable Textarea extension for Firefox that I’ve been using for several months now. :)

Tags: apple, browsers, firefox, ie7, safari, wwdc

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Something rather unexpected happened at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference this morning - a Windows version of the Safari browser was announced, and a beta build was made available for download.

I’ve spent the last couple of hours using it on my desktop running Vista and here are my initial thoughts and impressions. Comments are welcome.

The Good:

• Speed, speed, speed: As always, Apple has posted lots of numbers for you to chew on, and I was initially skeptical of the claims made. But after repeatedly testing Firefox 2, IE 7 and the Safari 3 beta on a pretty wide variety of sites (including those with 100+ images, heavy Javascript, etc.), I really do feel that Safari is perceivably the fastest of the three. This could be the one thing that could get me to switch browsers, if only it weren’t for the other limitations (read on). FYI, I’m on a dual-core Opteron system with 2GB of RAM.
• WebKit for Windows: This is perhaps the best part of having an official version of Safari for Windows. Web developers can now run their work through the WebKit rendering engine even if they don’t have access to a Mac. It certainly beats using the old browser screenshot services. :)
• Did I mention it’s fast? :P

The Bad:

• Am I still using Windows? If you thought iTunes and QuickTime looked out of place in Windows, wait till you see this thing; it’s like Apple ripped Safari out of OS X, added a menu bar to the top, and called it a Windows app. Textboxes, buttons, radio buttons, checkboxes…they all use the bubbly Aqua style. I guess this wouldn’t be so bad if it were 2004 and we were all skinning XP to look like OS X, but can we get something more native, please? Probably unlikely, but one can always hope.
• Who turned off ClearType? Somewhat related to the above point, Safari renders fonts differently from every other application on your system. This can be good or bad, depending on your preference, but it’s certainly disconcerting at first. I could probably get used to it with time, and the “Light” font smoothing option looks better than the default “Medium” setting to me. Try it.
• Look ma, no borders! This is one of those things that throws me off every time I use OS X, and now Windows users can get a piece of the aggravation too - you can only resize the window using the tiny gripper at the bottom right corner. Who in the world thought this was a good idea anyway?
• It’s no Firefox: As with my experiment with IE 7, I miss my extensions. Enough said.

The Ugly:

• Wonky mouse support: I could live with most of the limitations outlined in the previous section if I really, really had to, but this one’s a deal breaker, hence the new “ugly” section. The back and forward buttons on my mouse simply don’t work in Safari, and the scrolling speed with the mouse wheel is far too sluggish. This singlehandedly makes the whole browsing experience just dreadful. Apple, please get this fixed ASAP. And while you’re at it, how about letting us middle-click tabs to close them (as IE and Firefox do), rather than having us aim for the tiny “X” buttons?

So yeah, it’s not all bad, but it’s not all great either. Many of the shortcomings are forgivable, considering this is the first beta release of an application that they’ve never released for Windows, but they’re certainly enough to prevent me from using it as my primary browser. That said, it has found its place in my web development toolbox, giving me a way to finally test sites in WebKit quickly and easily, so not all is lost. :)

Tags: apple, browsers, firefox, ie7, safari, wwdc

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