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…

Firefox 2.0.0.5 was released earlier this week, which I promptly installed on my computers, and it got me thinking about how software updates are pushed out by various software vendors in the market.

Even though most software updates are delivered via the internet in some shape or form, there’s still a large fraction of applications that don’t include any kind of built-in updating mechanism (which is why tools like FileHippo are so handy). No wonder I come across so many people who continue to run old versions of software on their computers for months, or even years; they simply don’t know that there are updates out there, and who can blame them for it?

Moreover, out of the applications that do include the ability to update themselves automatically, very few manage to do so in an elegant way. Some applications install separate helper utilities that run when the system boots up, and they remain in memory, checking for updates at regular intervals. These tools often slow down the boot up process, consume system resources, and pop up update dialog boxes when you least expect them. Other applications relentlessly notify you of available updates, then force you to manually save and close all your work when you finally run out of patience and give in. I won’t point fingers at any particular apps, but I’m sure most of you can figure out which ones I’m referring to. ;)

For these reasons, I find the Firefox update process so refreshing. It works exactly like one would expect it to, and even goes above and beyond to avoid inconveniencing the user.

• There are no separate memory-resident helper utilities; Firefox automatically checks for updates only while it’s running.
• When an update is found, a dialog box appears, giving the user the choice to download and install the update, or defer the process for later.
• If the user accepts the update, Firefox saves its state (all open tabs), closes, installs the update, and re-opens in the same state as it was before. Brilliant.
• The update mechanism plays well with the User Account Control (UAC) feature in Windows Vista, something that even many commercial applications have yet to achieve.

If only more software vendors would follow Mozilla’s example, the desktop would be a much better place.

In the next post, we’ll take a look at another great software updating mechanism that uses a different approach, but works very well too. Until then, can you think of other applications that do a particularly good job at keeping themselves up-to-date without getting in the user’s way?

I’m still primarily a Firefox user myself, but I do fire up IE 7 from time to time. That’s when IE7Pro, a free power-packed browser add-on, comes in really handy. I forgot to mention it here back when I first installed it, but Ed Bott’s post reminded me again today.

IE7Pro brings some of the most popular features from Firefox to IE 7, including inline search (aka find-as-you-type), spell checking, mouse gestures, ad blocking, crash recovery, and even a Greasemonkey-like user-scripts manager with its own repository.

Installing the add-on causes no noticeable performance hit from my experience with it, and it brings a wealth of useful functionality to an otherwise barebones browser. So give it a try, especially if IE 7 is your primary browser.

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. :)

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. :)