Talk about getting your head in the game.
As if testing on two browsers is not enough (or three, for Opera, so stop writing that email now! I get flamed enough already, thank you), Apple sets loose its flagship browser onto Windows machines in WWDC07 in an effort to what can be interpreted as a move to increase awareness of the Apple experience. Or, in El Jobso’s own words, “giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell”.
In case you lost track already, here’s a quick review at what we have now:
- the Gecko engine (utilized by Mozilla sea monkey suite, Firefox and Camino);
- WebCore, or WebKit, or KHTML, depending on whom you ask, from Konqueror, from which Safari nicked; and of course:
- the unimaginatively named Microsoft HTML engine, the very bowels of Microsoft’s operating systems since Windows 95
Thankfully for us, static pages are old and forgotten, and we embrace the magic of PHP and push, dynamic content. Gone are the days when you have to worry about image placement on each and every page, and how they’d look like on every platform out there.
Reversely, the process of working with slicing images, and the intricacies of getting white spaces and implicit border overheads in the code to correctly display – have not changed much. Bright side: you now only have to get just one “template” page correctly (e.g., in WordPress, this is the single.php file).
The Safari for Windows Beta is very much that – a beta. It being released in a developer (and not a consumer) conference, it’s just enough to allow developers and designers (and loving bloggers looking out for the <10% of hits from Safari users!) do some testing and gauge just how WebKit-friendly their sites are, even if Firefox is still the de facto browser of the blogging crowd in either Windows or Mac. I have yet to find technical documentation on the differences (or identicalness) of the Windows from the native Mac OS version though. Download Safari 3 for Windows BETA here.
Originally posted on June 12, 2007 @ 5:58 am
