This will be really useful for those of you who need to test your webapp on Safari, but only run windows. Actually, I'm probably the only one who does that.

Also, if you're going to develop a webapp for the iPhone, get it working on Safari and it will just work on the iPhone. So says Steve..

Shawn

"Only run windows ... I'm probably the only one." -- nup, me too. :-) What I was wondering, though, is whether the Windows version will have any quirks of the Mac one? In other words, presumably it'll be a useful test of how pages will look in Safari/Mac.

Must say, that resizable textbox feature is sweetness! I've seen that done with JavaScript before, but built into the browser -- cool.

It seems to use its own font-smoothing algorithm rather than the Windows one. Everything (including tiny fonts) are aliased, which at least on my laptop is not as clear.

I don't have access to the Windows version BUT you might be able to mitigate the small-font problem with some configuration. In the Mac version of Safari you can to to Preferences-Advanced and tell Safari to "Never use font sizes smaller than X." And in OSX's System Preferences you can go to "Appearance" and tell OSX to "Turn off text smoothing for font sizes X and smaller." Good luck!

Oh god, this is HORRIBLE news. I would have preferred something like "Apple finally gives up on Safari"

Is there some reason people use Safari instead of Firefox?

I personally can't use any browser except Firefox, because I can't stand the web without adblocking.

There are lots of little reasons why I end up using it most of the time:

It, like all Cocoa apps, supports some of the emacs key-bindings out of the box. CTRL-a, CTRL-e, CTRL-k all work as expected when editing any text.

If I double click on a word to highlight it and then right click on the highlighted word I'm able to look the word up in the OED resident on my computer. I can do this amazingly fast. And I do it all the time.

I have a huge bookmark collection. And Spotlight can search it.

I can check my spelling. Have it highlight misspelled words if I want. Bring up a spell-check dialog box, etc.

There are probably ways to get all those features in Firefox but Safari is the path of least resistance.

Camino supports emacs bindings, so near as I can tell. It doesn't do the dictionary thing, but the dictionary isn't really OED anyway, it's OAD, which is different. In any event, you can use the services menu if you need it, or just do what I do and use Google. Camino 1.5 checks spelling with the OS X spell checker. It has built-in flash block and ad block if you want it. You can search you bookmarks in the app, but I don't know they're exposed to Spotlight. Probably not. You could use a Quicksilver plug-in, maybe.

I've used Camino 1.0.4 extensively but I've not looked at 1.5 yet. 1.0.4 is closer to what I want than Firefox is but it was not quite "there". Basic things like .pdf files NOT being viewed inside the browser bothered me. Maybe that's fixed in 1.5?

Point taken on OED vs. OAD. Regardless it's a fine dictionary and lookups are really fast.

Using the services menu to look up words is a good idea but I'd need to have a compelling reason to go though the effort of retraining myself. Plus the process will never be as fast and natural as a right-click.

The ad-blocking advantage of Firefox/Camino is not a compelling reason for me personally (at least now). So it's status-quo for me unless something changes.

The OED is actually kind of terrible as a dictionary. It's great if you want to know the history of a word, but if you just need to know the most common meaning of a word quickly, it's beyond overkill.

Safari does block the annoying and often superfluous pop up ads. You can a third party plugin to block other ads at:

http://pimpmysafari.com/plugins/?c=Adblocking

However, don't you think ads are a necessity to keep the web free? I've always wondered what the users of adblocking software desire.

I don't mind text ads, or low-key static images. What I can't stand are ads that bounce around. By design, they distract you. When advertisers abuse the user, I have no problem blocking them.

Curiously, there is a startup in the summer cycle that's working on the problem of how to make tolerable ads.

Curiously? No, not curiously! YOU picked them. OF COURSE there is a startup doing something you feel there is a need for. YOU are the judge! :)

I agree, but I don't consider it too wrong to use flash block, since a) flash is slow and b) flash makes it impossible to read while something is spinning around next to the text. Like pop-up blocking, it only filters out the stuff advertisers shouldn't be doing anyway.

i was just waiting for someone to say this. thanks!

+1. Thank you for the link. Currently I use my rare visits to the Apple store to test our pages on Safari :-) Besides, it is truly a speedy browser, especially when connection is good.

Their page, however, along with their benchmarks is very misleading. It is widely known that IE starts almost instantly because of of the DLLs it uses have already been preloaded by Windows apps (regular file explorer in particular).

Also their JavaScript performance of IE7 is also a suspect. In my own use (not scientific in any way) IE7 outperformed FireFox by 30% but I was using alot of regular expressions so it was mostly regex performance rather than pure JS execution speed.

"It is widely known that IE starts almost instantly because of of the DLLs it uses have already been preloaded by Windows apps (regular file explorer in particular)."

That's not my experience. It seems to lock the OS as it tries and grab some system-wide resources (DirectX?). The cursor stops moving and mp3s stop playing for a good half minute.

The same happens with Windows Explorer. Even Firefox comes up quicker than Windows Explorer.

They just ran I-Bench from Ziff Davis. I ran it too and their numbers are correct. I-Bench is measuring a lot of components so IE7 might, indeed, be faster on regex but it is not overall.

Is there anyway to turn off font smoothing? I like Windows standard (not Cleartype) font smoothing over everything else.

You can turn it down, but not off, as far as I can tell. Actually, even turning it down didn't make much difference. It looks a bit odd.

beats running IE (IE 7 still doesn't run on windows 2000, safari does!) and should make cross platform dev at least a little easier for windows web programmers (is there still such a thing?).

I doubt it will take any market away from IE. Those who know anything use firefox. Like the green party candidate that steals 5% of the vote and gets a republican elected, I think all this will do is take a chunk out of firefox's base.

Right. I've always wondered about Apple's reasoning for releasing Safari to begin with. If their goal was to decrease IE's market share, I'd think they would've put their browser R&D dollars into Firefox and helped to build a single, truly great alternative browser. Plus, it seems that supporting a cross-platform browser would be another way to win over Windows users to the Mac: "You can run many of your favorite applications, like Microsoft Office, and even Firefox, the world's most powerful web browser!"

Does anybody know more about why Apple took this route?