Jun 12 2007
Safari Available on Windows
Having dominated the mp3 player market, Apple are now stepping up their fight in the browser wars.
Steve Jobs made the announcement yesterday at the Worldwide Developers Conference that Apple has released a public Beta of Safari on Windows. You can view the keynote speech on the Apple website.
Apple claims that Safari runs faster than IE, Firefox and Opera. Having recently upgraded to a mac, I can verify that it runs faster than Firefox. What is good news for developers is that Safari is a browser that pays close attention to web standards, passing the Acid 2 test. Since Microsoft didn’t bother fixing all of the rendering bugs in IE7, if only a few windows users switch then this is a step in the right direction.
The question is, why will people switch? Most home users of the internet are happy enough with their pre-installed copy of Internet Explorer. I suspect that if the iPhone takes off in the UK the advanced features of Safari on the iPhone (such as pinch-zoom) will intrigue Windows users enough to tryout Safari on their desktop.
** UPDATE **
Whoops! It looks like there are still some bugs to be fixed.
