[Author's Note: I wrote this a few weeks ago and, for various reasons, it didn’t run. I've been re-reading it, and decided that it still works to describe what I think about Safari. We're (with any luck at all) a bit closer to Apples release of the new and improved Mac OS, so we may not have to wait quite so long to see what the longer-term game is, but the issues brought up here are still important. We're very interested in what you think about the browser wars. Let me know if my impressions match yours, of if you think I've missed something critical in my look at Safari.]
If there's one thing the Windows world has been clamoring for, it's another web browser. Right. Apple has heard the cries and released Safari for Windows. I've been using Safari since the day of its public release, and I've found a number of interesting facts and features in the browser. I'm running the software on top of Vista Business, and the parallels between the two are most fascinating. The first and most important parallel is in the overall impression I've gotten from the experience. My take: Safari for Windows (like Vista) is not quite fully baked. Everything else, both good and bad, flows out of that essential understanding.
First, let me cover the good parts of Safari. It's supposed to be fast, and it does seem to load a given page a bit faster than does IE 7.0.6000.26473 (the version currently on my system). Safari has embraced tabbed browsing with an interface that will be familiar to anyone who's using another mainstream browser. It would have been nice if the tab bar were enabled by default, but it's easy enough to have it show up and I can consider this a matter of personal taste. RSS feeds are simple to set up and show up conveniently in the bookmarks bar at the top of the page. I also found that Safari deals with certain add-ins (notably the Adobe Flash player) more gracefully than IE under Vista. Others have noted that Safari may allow better display of colors than IE. This may be so, but on the sites I usually visit it's not critical. All this is nice but not revolutionary. It's also about the limit of the things I've found to be really happy about in Safari. Now, let's look at the other side of the ledger.
I hadn't realized how much I've grown accustomed to Aero until I ran Safari. Safari presents a gunmetal-gray facade that's almost brutal next to IE's translucent Aero skin. In many ways it's an Auto Union aesthetic bluntness versus the Raymond Loewy curves of Vista, but there's a substantial visual difference between the two. In another visual difference, there's no bar across the bottom of the window: the display simply ends at the lower edge of the information. It's not horrible, but it's somewhat disconcerting until you get used to it.
The "unfinished" aspects of Safari begin with the minimizing behavior. Most windows applications have three visual modes: maximized (full screen), restored down (visible in a window smaller than full screen), and minimized (to the task bar). When the app is minimized and then restored, it returns to its previous size. Not Safari. No matter its size when minimized, it always restores down to a small window. This isn’t a fatal flaw, but it's annoying.
Another quirk is closer to fatal: Safari had a great deal of trouble coping with my dual-monitor setup. I run a second monitor to the right of my laptop screen, and typically run the browser on the large second screen. Every Windows application I've tried can be dragged to the second screen and maximized to fill the screen. Safari is different. Dragged to the large screen and maximized, it disappears. It took a couple of tries before I realized that it was actually maximizing to a mythical third screen seen by no other application. I could move it back to the second screen, but this was yet another annoyance, and evidence that Safari isn't recognizing Vista screen parameters in quite the same way other Windows applications do.
To be honest, Safari left me scratching my head in many regards. Apple is known for releasing relatively well-finished software, but Safari for Windows prompted three updates within the first few days of public release. Apple is famous for visual polish in its applications, but has taken less advantage of Aero than any other Vista-capable application I’ve found. Even setting preferences uses the Macintosh convention (you finish setting preferences then simply click the "x" box in the upper right-hand corner), rather than existing Windows conventions. How could Apple have done this?
Pondering that question, I thought back to a discussion with Bill Gates in the mid-1980s. Microsoft had just released Excel to compete with the market-defining Lotus 1-2-3. Excel was a fairly awful piece of software, and the assembled journalists were giving Bill an earful about it. He acknowledged the state of Excel, and told us that Microsoft simply needed an entry point. Having gained entry to the market, he knew that the company could improve the product to become competitive. Given the current market position of Lotus 1-2-3, you have to admit it was a successful strategy.
I have no special insight on Apple's plans, but the current version of Safari for Windows feels like an entry point. It doesn't have the feeling of a fully-cooked application from a major publisher, but it feels a lot like a product that's been brought to market to establish a beach-head, with more development to come. Could Apple be planning other Windows software or wider availability for Mac OS? I don't know. I do know I'm looking forward to the next stage of development for this application.
Posted by Curt Franklin on August 3, 2007 09:51 AM
