As a person who spent a good part of last year developing browser-based code in JavaScript, XHTML and CSS, I am not a fan of Safari. It is not up to date with current standards and its behaviors are different than those of the more significant browsers, Internet Explorer and Firefox.
Releasing Safari to Windows users seems like a last ditch effort to defend the investment in a browser nobody needs anymore. Firefox works perfectly fine on a Mac; offering Safari to Windows users is an attempt to boost the user base that left Safari for browsers for ones that work. If more people use Safari, more websites will need to deal with it, making the lives of interface developers more difficult as it *does* need specialized code.
Comical to me is the fact that Safari touts its speed as its selling point.
Browser speed was a factor when you were using a 300Mhz computer, but on modern machines and current browsers and broadband, speed is so much less of a factor.
I am all about competition, but seems to me like Internet Explorer and Firefox keep each other busy enough. And on the Mac, well, Safari can stay there just for Apple’s world domination schemes.
In short, if you are a Windows user, please do nothing. You can use the hard drive space for like, paying Apple for iTunes songs.
One reply on “Safari for Windows: Nobody needs it”
[…] I’m with many others, including Yuval, in saying that Apple porting Safari to Windows is unfortunate. Web developers have basically got 3 main browsers to deal with right now, and adding a 4th isn’t going to help. IE6 is dying, but still prevalent. IE7 isn’t great, but is obviously a force to be reckoned with. Firefox is bloated and slow, but comfy and relatively painless to develop against. Safari is outdated, buggy and less standards-compatible than IE7 or Firefox, often intentionally so (try styling a submit button). […]