Safari for Windows: Apple doing unto others …
... what PC developers have been doing to them for years.
Safari for Windows is out. And so far, I’m not liking it. I am a PC user, but I own a Mac machine as well and I’ve used Safari on it a fair amount.
So what am I hating about it? First and foremost, Apple broke the golden rule that every PC software developer that ported to the Mac was shamed for doing: Apple has forced their OS’s s look/feel and UI conventions onto another OS. Take this screen shot of the Safari for Windows Preferences panel:
It looks just like the Mac. The buttons, the colors, the behavior of the controls. The way you can tell it’s a Windows dialog is Apple managed to get the close button in the proper place. But everything else is pure Mac. I remember when I was heavily into the Mac vs. Amiga Windows debates with my buddies in the 90s. We’d hear all sort of stories about how a developer on the PC flopped with a port to the Mac that Mac users outright rejected because the UI didn’t conform to the Mac OS standards. As a budding UI designer I was reminded again and again to respect the conventions of the platform. Looks like Apple has flatly rejected that.
Safari for Windows is a step beyond what iTunes for Windows has done. Even though iTunes carried over a few of the Mac UI conventions, the majority of dialogs, popups, and controls in iTunes for Windows used standard Windows conventions and rendering styles. It looks like Safari for Windows throws that out entirely.
Enough with the blurry fonts
The first thing I did when I fired up Safari was I went to turn off text anti-aliasing in browser. This had already got my glasses steamed because Windows has a global setting for text anti-aliasing. Why does the app have to have it’s own setting? Why can’t Safari default to what the user has already chosen? I’ll tell you why it can’t: because Safari for Windows apparently doesn’t have an option to turn text anti-aliasing off. Check out the screen shot of the “text smoothing” option from Safari for Windows:
Just three shades of yuck; it’s missing “none”. The end result is that every web page I view with Safari is just unreadable to me. For what it’s worth, Internet Explorer 7 does the same thing by default, but at least it has an option to turn it completely off.
Even more weirdness
Even though Safari for Windows is a total eyesore, I decided to write this blog post in it to give it a true kick in the tires. But I quickly switched back to Firefox. Why? Because In Safari for Windows the Wordpress “quicktags” bar was missing. This was probably Wordpress’s fault, but that really doesn’t matter to me -- it’s going to stop me from using Safari.
I spent a few seconds hovering over the top of edge of the window to try to resize it before realizing the Safari window can only be resized in the lower-right corner. And Safari for Windows is missing tooltips on their unfathomable toolbar icons. What the hell is the spider button? Do I have to click it to figure out what it is?
Rant over
Am I happy Apple released Safari for Windows? Yes. It means I no longer have to fire up my Mac when I want to test web page design on Safari. But it doesn’t look like I’ll be using it; for all the same reasons that Mac users rejected shoddy Windows ports for all these many years.
I'm Hanford Lemoore. My parking skills are unparalleled.
June 11th, 2007 at 1:06 pm
Doesn’t ITunes on the PC have the same “issue”, that it looks much much more like a Mac app then a PC app?
June 11th, 2007 at 1:08 pm
The main UI of iTunes for Windows looks just like the mac, but preferences panels and other dialogs use windows controls.
June 11th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
Apple has forced their OS’s s look/feel and UI conventions onto another OS.
Windows apps look like crap. Why would Apple want to produce another app for Windows that looks like hell? At least I have on app on my PC that doesn’t look like it was a failing project in a college UI development lab course.
I was taken aback by the scrollbar controls though.
June 11th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
Why would Apple want to produce another app for Windows that looks like hell?
One man’s hell is another man’s heaven.
It’s just about respecting the conventions of the OS. It’s about comfort level. It’s about not requiring a user to needlessly re-learn conventions that they already know.
June 11th, 2007 at 1:40 pm
“Am I happy Apple released Safari for Windows? Yes. It means I no longer have to fire up my Mac when I want to test web page design on Safari.”
I would say the opposite, it gives you one more platform to test this browser on -- I wouldn’t assume Safari is always 100% consistent across both operating systems.
June 11th, 2007 at 2:17 pm
To paraphrase what someone said recently, Safari on Windows is like giving a second glass of ice water to somebody in hell.
But what this is really about is the iPhone. Safari on Windows increases Safari’s market share which will make web developers consider it alongside IE and Firefox, which means more apps for, and hence uptake of, the iPhone.
June 11th, 2007 at 2:54 pm
I took the leap of faith and clicked the spider icon for you.
It’s a bug report for the current page. Two checkboxes were of interest to me. “send screen shot” and “send source”
June 11th, 2007 at 2:55 pm
Let’s also not forget that this is a beta and we can still raise hell and maybe be able to impact the final development path. (however small that chance may be).
June 11th, 2007 at 3:00 pm
“I would say the opposite, it gives you one more platform to test this browser on -- I wouldn’t assume Safari is always 100% consistent across both operating systems.”
It seems to me that at lot of the things Apple is doing that I’m complaining about is actually trying very hard to make Safari on Windows render exactly the way it does on the Mac. But you’re right, until that is heavily, heavily proven, we should still test on the Mac.
June 12th, 2007 at 12:31 am
I have now switched to Safari, wow, this is so better looking and so faster as well.I am so happy to have now a second piece of innovative software on my win machine, the first was iTunes.
June 12th, 2007 at 1:05 am
Oh well, you don’t get it: a Windows app ported to the Mac should adopt the Mac look and feel. A Mac app ported to Windows should… Retain the Mac look and feel… Because the Mac look and feel is superior... At least Steve would want you to think so.
By the way, I understand why Apple wants to port its look to Windows: it wants to show users what a Mac looks like. I agree, though, that it’s wrong. When in Rome, do as the Romans, do even if you hate Rome’s guts.
June 12th, 2007 at 2:35 am
If it used Windows font smoothing then the layout/look of the pages would not be the same as it is on the Mac and iPhone thereby negating the whole point of Apple releasing it in the first place—i.e. get Windows developers & designers testing for Mac/iPhone compatibility.
[)amien
June 12th, 2007 at 2:57 am
Just for the kicks and to hopefully spark a debate but as far as I’ve seen Firefox uses it’s own buttons in Windows, along with a lot of other programs. Most driver programs seem to have some funky custom window GUI that’s made of pictures and blue bevelled buttons.
In Windows there are a lot of different interface styles, what is Apple to do? They could try to copy Microsoft but they change their application interfacess every other year with Office.
So they did their own GUI. I don’t like it but at least it’s consistant.
June 12th, 2007 at 4:02 am
@Detlef: yeah, wow, in 2007 nothing says “innovative software” like another web-browser.
June 12th, 2007 at 8:54 am
It’s just about respecting the conventions of the OS
There isn’t one.
Windows is host to numerous non-standard UIs and interfaces. People doing installers are the worst for it but even games do UIs that don’t even have minimal Windows controls.
Even MS doesn’t follow their own UI conventions… look at Vista for instance.
True, Safari is an extreme case but its not as if it is an anomaly
June 12th, 2007 at 8:57 am
By the way, I understand why Apple wants to port its look to Windows: it wants to show users what a Mac looks likeS
It could also be a side-effect of their efforts to port the Safari code over to Windows. It might have been simpler to do this.
June 12th, 2007 at 11:47 am
There isn’t one. Windows is host to numerous non-standard UIs and interfaces.
Yes but there’s an overwhelming majority of apps that use standard Windows UIs, and when other apps have non-standard UIs, it also feels weird. Some people still complain about JKai Krause’s non-standard UIs from the 90s.
The popup selection menus on Safari pop upwards instead of downwards. No other windows app that I know of does this. It just feels weird. And when I say that, I’m not lying. We can debate the finer points of UI specifics all day, but it won’t change the fact that Safari feels weird to me; almost toy-like in an unprofessional way -- like bundleware that comes pre-installed on a cheap PC.
(oh, that was low, I know!
)
June 12th, 2007 at 12:32 pm
Can someone please post screenshots of the same page rendered in Safari 3, running on OS X and Windows, on the same hardware? I simply cannot believe that Safari looks as bad in OS X as it does in Windows.
June 12th, 2007 at 6:14 pm
I just typed this reply in a very tiny box…thanks to the fact that I can resize the textarea box in Safari. Try that on IE!!
June 12th, 2007 at 7:52 pm
What’s IE?
--Hanford, the Firefox user.
June 12th, 2007 at 11:06 pm
[Removed -- Andy, I had to remove your comment. This is a no-fanboy Zone. Sorry.—Hanford]
June 13th, 2007 at 5:30 am
It’s important to remember what Safari on Windows is for. It’s two things in one:
1. An iPhone web developer’s rig
2. Another trojan horse along with iTunes to entice people to a foreign system.
Apple aren’t likely thinking of dethroning IE or displacing Firefox here. As such, they’re not particularly interested in being a good Windows citizen. They have an ulterior motive or two … insert cackle!
As for what Safari on the Mac looks like: you’ll need to check a real Mac. Screenshots from either operating system always look worse when rendered on the other. Seriously, try it out. Apple’s Quartz can make Windows apps look like arse and vice versa. The whole system on either platform is handled in a different way. A fact which is particularly jarring when rebooting an Intel Mac via Boot Camp.
June 13th, 2007 at 11:06 am
Jogdish, I’m sure that can be done on IE if you use some alternative to Opera’s User Javascript and Firefox’ Greasemonkey extension (I remember Trixie but from the look of the website it hasn’t been updated since ‘05). But either way, I don’t consider it very hard to win from IE. =)
June 13th, 2007 at 11:29 am
“Can someone please post screenshots of the same page rendered in Safari 3, running on OS X and Windows, on the same hardware?”
I don’t know if this still is the case, but AFAIK the Mac has gamma correction for monitors that Windows don’t. When porting images from Mac to Windows for video games in the 90s, I would always have to gamma correct them.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the font rendering looking “dark” to some people (The darkness has nothing to do with my complaint personally).
June 13th, 2007 at 1:00 pm
As much as I prefer the look of OSX over Windows, I don’t understand why Apple designs its Windows apps to look like OSX apps. All developers should follow the guidelines of the OS their app will be running in. Same goes for other apps in Windows or OSX that have their own GUI. I don’t like ‘em.
But no one is gonna tell me Safari sucks without me busting a gut. I’ve tried every browser I can get my hands on-- For Windows and for OSX. I keep going back to Safari. It’s not that other browsers don’t have features that I like or would like to see in Safari. It’s simply that Safari has features or methods of doing things that I miss too much when using another browser. Safari 3 for OSX will pretty much deliver the few items I miss in Safari. The rest I’ll add myself, just like I have with Safari 2.
I may sound like yet another Mac fan-boy, but there’s a reason I’m such a fan. After 10+ years of Windows the frustration finally got to me. To me Windows is a hand holding, stifling Big Brother. I got tired of getting my hand slapped. OSX gives me so much more room to move around in. Another point, I was always a command line freak from day one on my PCs. In the DOS days I preferred 4DOS ( http://www.jpsoft.com/ ). With Windows, I lived by 4NT (JPSoft, again). But in OSX.. yeah, I have iTerm (3rd party terminal emulation) going almost all of the time, but I manage just fine in the OS GUI and Finder.
June 13th, 2007 at 6:13 pm
The author forgot to mention two weirdest things about the Preference dialog: buttons instead of tabs and resizing every time when you change the active “tab”.
Other “features” are plain terrible—main window can be resized only by dragging the bottom right corner, and scroll bar sucks. But I guess, I’m repeating other posts here.
Whoever mentioned “the drivers” -- yeah, they do all this fancy stuff to show how cool they are, but for me, it brings out just pity. A good example are Asus’ bug-infested tools bundled with motherboards.
June 19th, 2007 at 6:13 pm
I compared that Safari preferences screenshot my my Safari preferences (on Mac OS X) and the windows version is definitely more blurry… so there is a difference in the safari versions
June 20th, 2007 at 12:38 am
Sam, Those screenshots in my blog were shrunk to fit my blog format; the blurriness is in the shrinking process.
August 3rd, 2007 at 10:50 am
Zac: Microsoft experiment with new UI controls and things—usually in new versions of Office. That causes inconsistency, but moves things along in terms of interface design. Swings and roundabouts I suppose. Then you have abominations like Media Player and Live Messenger which just don’t quite look like anything else at all.
Apple do exactly the same thing. The main reason they look more consistent is because their OS is newer overall, and because they produce a major version where they can rejig all the bundled apps much more often than Microsoft do. They also have abominations: Quicktime Player, anybody?
October 15th, 2007 at 4:35 pm
It could also be a side-effect of their efforts to port the Safari code over to Windows. It might have been simpler to do this.
November 20th, 2007 at 7:12 am
I personally think Apple could have made Safari more windows like. After all Microsoft tries hard to get its Applications like Office for mac to look and funtion more like OS 10. This is a half attempt at porting another browser to windows.
I am not sure we need another one? Seems to me that Apple and Microsoft both should stick to their respective systems. Quit trying to make a PC a Mac and the same goes for Mac trying to look like Windows. I won’t bash ether one. They both are pretty stable operating systems and of course Windows is still what the majority of people and businesses use. I think Microsoft was smart in dropping IE for the Mac. Although I have a couple of web sites that don’t work with Safari quite right. I still think that Safari is a very good browser for Mac. Just as I have no problem using IE in Windows. It just works for me. I think it’s childish to wine about another browser such as Firefox or Safari not working right in Windows. But insisting that they will NEVER go back to IE? What gives with you people? It’s just a browser? A piece of software? I don’t say Firefox is a bad browser. But I certainly had issues with plugins and web site rendering issues. I know a lot of it has to do with the web site but so what! Like their going to fix it. No, probably not! So I just went back to IE which maybe less compliant but it does work all the time! That’s what I want. Something that works all the time.
December 20th, 2007 at 3:07 pm
“After all Microsoft tries hard to get its Applications like Office for mac to look and funtion more like OS 10.”
No, it really doesn’t. I’ve used MS Office, NeoOffice, OpenOffice, and iWork, and of them all, OpenOffice and MSOffice do the worst job of being OSX-like (and OO never said it was trying to). Some of the key shortcuts are even kept as their windows equivalents, not the OSX equivalent. At least they get a couple effort points for not making it run in X11.
Remember, just because it uses the drawing routines from the OS doesn’t mean it has the same look and feel.
January 25th, 2008 at 6:40 am
“Sam, Those screenshots in my blog were shrunk to fit my blog format; the blurriness is in the shrinking process”
If you’re such an expert, why the hell would you do that. It’s core purpose would be a visual reference to support what you’re saying. You’re contradicting you’re opinion by doing what you blame Apple for, namely putting esthetics (or even propaganda) over purpose.
May 26th, 2008 at 4:17 am
@ Timo
What are you on about? Not all people have broadband connections, you can’t just go sticking in full size images of screen shots! So, no, he isn’t putting esthetics over purpose.
He’s doing the opposite.
June 30th, 2008 at 5:00 am
You’ll probably find it was just a lazy thing – something like “just port it into Windows” rather than recode it for Windows. I suppose you can’t blame them, but it is a bit hypocritical on their part – that’s for sure.
Now, about Amiga… man, I wish Amiga would come back. Amiga was so awesome back in the 80’s – what a brilliant brand!