I tried out Safari 3.0 beta for windows today. Some of its features really sparkle. The QuickTime-like look-and-feel just makes you feel right. In-browser widgets are all Apple style, which is quite surprising. It features some animated browsing experience too. And the best of all is its inline searching, which to me is a big deal (see this post), you should at least try that feature if you ever installs Safari.
With that said, Safari is still far from perfect. I used it for 5 minutes and spotted at least 4 bugs. It lacks extensions (as those for Firefox) and it's not available on other OS's like Linux. I didn't feel the speed that Apple claims on its promotion page.
Apple has a long journey to travel to win the browser war, if that is ever going to happen. However the birth of Safari windows version is indeed a good news to web developers, because they don't have to jump from one machine to another to test their web pages on the most popular browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera...).
1 comments:
The first few iterations of iTunes are rather unresponsive and lacking features. Frankly it's impossible for a new software product to be first at the first try, especially for somebody migrating to a new platform, without knowledge of all the hacks and tricks inherent in any operating system.
Apple has always been targeting design-conscious consumers with superb product design, that's why it has a loyal following no matter what mistakes it made when delivering products. People from Microsoft get particularly frustrating when two radically different responses are generated by essentially the same issue found in OSX and Windows. Call it unfairness, but Steve Jobs has made the Apple brand a lot more distinguished since he regained the CEO title. Technology alone is never a winning formula for hot-selling products.
I don't know how easy it is to build an application on OS X, but according to my ex-colleague, his friend had a hard time finding necessary documentation for OS X system API, :-).
From my personal experience, iTunes 7 has become a lot more feature-complete and responsive. I believe Safari will follow a similar route, but the future is still uncertain, given Firefox has already established itself as a credible threat to IE 7. Unless Apple devises something unique to Safari, like what iTunes is to iPod, there is no reason to switch to Safari, except for the original Mac people who have gotten used to the Safari interface.
Post a Comment