Apple Safari 3 Beta for Windows

Finally, we can (hope­fully) test Safari on Win­dows too, but it remains to be seen how this com­pares with Fire­fox and its bat­tal­ion of exten­sions and the ever-blazing Opera.

Apple is on to some excit­ing things. After the iPhone and the new eagerly awaited of the Max OSX, it even announced Safari 3 Beta for Windows!

The install was pain­less. Espe­cially if you choose the no-Quicktime option (which Apple has no qualms about plug­ging shame­lessly with almost every down­load it offers). I was also asked dur­ing the instal­la­tion for 'Bon­jour' — a tool that sup­pos­edly allows bet­ter shar­ing of things such as printers.

The imme­di­ate uninstall

When I started the browser, it came up in some weird lan­guage. Greek, or Russ­ian, or a spe­cific kind of Celt. Who knows. I tried to rein­stall, and it insisted on remov­ing Safari first, which is ok, but it also required me to close Fire­fox, Secure­CRT (for SSH) and Win­SCP (for SFTP). I like my browsers to be inde­pen­dent of each other thank you. Opera never both­ers with what else I am using.

The sec­ond and final uninstall

After the re-install, it showed up yet again in the strange lan­guage. Nowhere on my sys­tem is this lan­guage set up. All my browsers are set up to show only Eng­lish, but sup­port Japan­ese and Chi­nese. I guess it's "beta" for a rea­son. It surely has a long way to go if it wants to be any­where near decent con­tention to FF and Opera. Below's a snap­shot of what this gunk looks like on my machine:

safari-windows-error.gif

Turns out these junk char­ac­ters are not really a lan­guage at all. When I try to type some­thing in the loca­tion bar, it comes up in this junk lingo. I try and rum­mage through these non­sen­si­cal options to see if one of the menus or sub­menus may have "Eng­lish" as an option, but no luck.

Con­clu­sion

This mutt is off my PC before it could even bark. So long, Safari, and thanks for all the fish.

  • ros­fur

    Actu­ally web devel­op­ers may want to read the fine print before uncork­ing the cham­pagne. The ren­der­ing engine inside Safari for PC is dif­fer­ent from that on Macs.

  • / snip­tools

    Hi, thanks for the info. (That was quick! Did you get here from down­load­squad?) I just read that the html ren­der­ing engine is a port of KHTML from Kon­queror (KDE), which should be a fairly capa­ble per­former and at least some Mac-ish sem­blance of a browser, which would make web design test­ing use­ful any­way. But it would help to first get this stu­pid thing work­ing on my machine!

  • T Law­less

    Don't know what hap­pened, but I installed it first thing this morn­ing with­out a hic­cup. I said no to Quick­time and yes to Bonjour.

    The visual inter­face is impres­sive — looks Mac like but I'm used to Firefox's set­tings. I could adapt to Safari but don't really have a rea­son too and that goes for run­ning my Mac too.

    To say it's bug-ridden and hard to install might be mis­lead­ing though.

  • / snip­tools

    "To say it’s bug-ridden and hard to install might be mis­lead­ing though."

    It is what it is. If a soft­ware can­not install and read my lan­guage prop­erly, it is hardly mis­lead­ing to call it bug-ridden. It's not hard to install at all, just con­fused and poorly pro­grammed. At any rate, the speed of access of web­sites is hardly much to swoon at. Opera still takes the cake by far. Of course these are my expe­ri­ences, on my Vaio with 2GB RAM and Core2Duo, which sug­gests to me that Opera knows how to make good use of the hard­ware with­out becom­ing a mem­ory hog ala Firefox.

  • der­ick

    my install of safari is doing it exactly the same thing — been trawl­ing try­ing to find out why the hell it's doing that, but got nowhere so far.… i'll check back here in case some­one posts a solution.…

  • / snip­tools

    Der­ick. My safari works now. Just keep installing Apple's auto updates and one fine day it will start to work. I have no clue when/why it started to work, but it did.

  • Zwan

    I have the same prob­lem with Safari 3.1. It just won't start after instal­la­tion. I am on Win­dows XP. I saw the prob­lem dis­cussed here by many users

    http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1447340&tstart=0

    If you have any ideas to fix it please email me. Thank you.

  • / snip­tools

    Just unin­stall and rein­stall it. Let it update itself. It'll cor­rect itself. Safari still doesn't match the con­ve­nience of Fire­fox or Opera on Win­dows (no plu­g­ins – hhmmpph!) but it's a nice way to test what your site etc may look like for many Mac users.