[LINK] Apple browser for windows

[andrew clarke]

On Tue, Jun 12, 2007 at 07:15:03PM +1000, Jan Whitaker wrote:

> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20070612/apple-developers/
> 
> Safari version for windows

I've been playing with the initial beta and have generally been
impressed, considering it's the first beta.  I haven't actually had it
crash on me yet, and rendering speed has been very good.  It also seems
to work quite well on an old 700 MHz Pentium III laptop, with 256 Mb
running Windows XP SP2 (with Windows optimised for speed).  Startup
speed has not been an issue.

A couple of problems with Safari/Win that I've encountered so far:

1. The most serious issue is that sometimes Safari/Win will somehow
inexplicably corrupt its internal DNS cache (I assume) and try to
retrieve HTTP resources from the wrong site. eg.
http://www.example.com/abc.jpg would be mistakenly retrieved as
http://www.othersite.com/abc.jpg, usually resulting in a 404 and thus a
"broken" image.  One workaround seems to use a Squid proxy, which is
something I do anyway, where you configure the proxy in Windows' Control
Panel -> Internet Options.  Then all of Safari's requests go through the
proxy.

2. The user interface, particularly the preferences window, is very
non-standard compared to many other Windows programs, although many
users won't be bothered by this since there will be nothing to
configure.  Microsoft are guilty of this sort of UI redesign too,
particularly with Office 2007.  The most irritating thing for me is that
it's currently impossible to minimise Safari by right clicking on its
button in the Windows task bar.  The only options available are Move and
Close.  If you want to Minimise or Maximise, you need to use the dark
grey icons on Safari's dark grey menu, in the top right hand corner. 
Those icons really should be coloured, at least.  Likewise, the close
buttons on the browser tabs are too difficult to see.

3. There appears no way to disable Apple's equivalent of ClearType text
anti-aliasing in the rendering engine, at least not from the
Preferences.  This doesn't bother me personally, as I generally like the
way it renders text, but it might irritate some people.

4. UNC paths don't work in the address bar, eg. \\machinename\file.html.
Safari changes this to http://machinename/file.html, which is wrong.

Regards
Andrew