Did Apple Just Quietly End Development Of Safari For Windows?

http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/25/apple-safari-for-windows-ends/

by Achshar • 14 years ago

73 62 14 years ago

techcrunch.com

barca_fan• 14 years ago

breaking news!

404error• 14 years ago

Barca!

masklinn3• 14 years ago

It would seem they also dropped Snow Leopard support. Not entirely unexpected, but potentially bothersome nonetheless.

statictype• 14 years ago

Since Snow Leopard was the last version of OSX to run PowerPC binaries, this may actually be quite annoying for all the people who have to be able to run their older apps and have not updated to 10.7 because of that.

dav-id• 14 years ago

Looks like I will have to start using IE then

icefox4• 14 years ago

My impression was that one of the primary drive of having Safari on Windows back in the day was to get more users exposed to WebKit and to gives developers on windows a way to test there sites. With Google Chrome on mac/windows/linux that seems to be a much more solved problem, not to mention all those old "windows devs" have an iphone now.

MatthewPhillips• 14 years ago

I don't know about you, but testing on Chrome and assuming it will also work on Safari is far from "good enough" for me.

darklajid• 14 years ago

I've never been a Safari user, on any platform.

Can you tell me if Safari on Windows was a reasonable way to test for Safari compatibility - or was it too far off from the 'real thing' so that you really test 'Safari on Windows or devices that weren't turned on for years' if you run it on a Windows based dev machine?

masklinn3• 14 years ago

On the other hand, testing on Safari/Windows did not ensure it'd work flawlessly in Safari/OSX (still a whole lot better than taking Chrome as a good enough approximation though)

ditoa• 14 years ago

I often wonder if Apple knew Google were working on their owner WebKit based browser? Safari was pretty pointless with the release of Chrome IMHO. It was never a very exciting browser.

icefox4• 14 years ago

Safari for Windows came out in summer of 2007, Google Chrome came out in September of 2008. Granted Chrome development started in 2006ish which was probably around the time Safari for Windows started. By the time Safari for windows was released those in the WebKit community knew Google was up to something, but didn't know a timetable, any details etc and from discussions they tossed out the first version so when Safari for Windows was released perhaps Google Chrome as we know it today was just starting. Looking at it from a business perspective or even just a 2006 perspective Apple's move makes a lot of sense.

Edit: Some of my memories are a bit fuzzy about what was going on exactly when in relation to everything else so feel free to correct any mistakes in the above.

bhousel• 14 years ago

Apparently, Google, Apple, Nokia, and RIM all submit patches to the Webkit project. Google's contributions have surpassed Apple's in recent years..

Edit: I did a little more digging, and it looks like Chrome did start out as a (not very) secret project for a few years. I'm not sure when they started submitting their own patches to Webkit-core (as required by LGPL?), but they did maintain their own fork of webkit until 2009.

jaredsohn• 14 years ago

Your question about the importance of developing Safari for Windows given that Chrome was in the works is interesting for this discussion, but your comments afterward seem out of place since they are about Safari as a whole.

I don't see how the existence of Chrome has any relevance to the creation of Safari as a whole. First, the timing might be off (I'll leave this for others to research.) More importantly, although I don't know exactly what the point of Safari was (presumably Apple wanted to have their own browser to include with the OS just like Microsoft did), I would have to think that if Chrome would satisfy that need then the latest Mozilla browser would have as well.

efalcao• 14 years ago

Meh. Safari's only utility on OS X is to install Chrome. IE fills that role on the Windows systems.

nicholassmith2• 14 years ago

Aside from all the people (like me) that like Safari. I use Chrome too, but I do genuinely like Safari's UI more than Chrome.

masklinn3• 14 years ago

Tell me about it, I still use Camino as my main browser because I find Chrome's UI dreadful and I find Safari's hiding habits annoying when I routinely load 100+ tabs.

jfb• 14 years ago

Different strokes for different folks. I don't like Chrome and am perfectly well served by Safari.

gte910h• 14 years ago

Now that safari has unified the search and url bar, I'm copacetic with either.

rat87• 14 years ago

or firefox.

kalleboo• 14 years ago

It seems as if there are still WebKit Nightlies being built for Windows, it would have been nice if they could tag which ones correspond to certain Safari releases for any Windows devs who want to test their sites in Safari.

laconian• 14 years ago

Meta-comment: why do tech blogs punch-up headlines with words like "just" and questionmarks?

bcbrown• 14 years ago

Because it gets them pageviews.

rwhitman• 14 years ago

Because they have no sources or comment from the company, and the entire article is speculation based on poking around the apple website

olleicua2• 14 years ago

Man I really liked pointing out that IE was the only major browser that didn't work on every major OS. Apple just lost what little high ground they had left in my book.

olleicua2• 14 years ago

Really though Apple and Microsoft need to both just accept that they lost the browser war and ship with Chrome or Firefox.

eridius4• 14 years ago

How does that even make sense? Apple was never even in a "browser war" to begin with, but even if you want to claim they've "lost" some sort of war, how does that lead to discontinuing their browsers? Besides the fact that Apple created WebKit and ship it as a core component of OS X, how does reducing browser choice benefit anyone?

pooriaazimi• 14 years ago

Safari on OS X is excellent. It was complete garbage on windows, but safari 4+ on OS X is an ideal browser IMO.

albertzeyer• 14 years ago

I always see Safari as a small GUI around vanilla WebKit -- i.e. Safari basically is WebKit. (Chrome on the other side has pushed it much further and WebKit seems to be only a part of it.)

From the history of WebKit, I also got the feeling that Apple did one of the most important work to modernize it to compete with IE, Firefox, Opera at the time it was released. Afaik, KHTML was not really as far.

Under this view, I don't really see your point. This work by Apple (WebKit/Safari) and by KDE is now part/base of one of the most important browsers, Chrome.

melling• 14 years ago

Apple is a company of extreme focus so this is to be expected. After all, Safari on Windows wasn't going anywhere and it wasn't a substitute for Safari on the Mac.

Hopefully, they'll refocus any Windows Safari people on Webgl.

kmfrk• 14 years ago

I get the impression they already started doing that, when Safari had to work in tandem with WebKit2WebProcess.exe (if I recall the right process), which is pretty good at crashing all my tabs.

Pretty sure Safari from one year ago worked better on Windows than it does now. :/

On the positive side, maybe Apple won't try to force-feed users the browser, when they install and update iTunes, anymore.

crazygringo• 14 years ago

Genuine question: has anyone here actually ever used Safari for Windows, except for browser testing? I've never met anyone.

So this doesn't really surprise me. Looking up the numbers says Safari is used by 0.46% percent on Windows users -- and it doesn't seem to have ever gotten much higher than that. Why waste resources on it?

DrJokepu• 14 years ago

Safari for Windows was released more than a year before the first Google Chrome beta. Before that, Webkit wasn't available on Windows at all and it was impossible to test websites on Webkit without a Mac. Google Chrome is now an excellent and widespread browser on Windows so there's no point maintaining Safari for Windows anymore.

randomdata• 14 years ago

I have encountered more than one bug that exists in either Chrome or Safari, but not both. If you only test using Chrome on Windows, you still won't really know how it will behave in Safari.

andrewfelix2• 14 years ago

I was using it before Chrome arrived. But the font rendering was jarringly out of place in a Windows context.

MBCook• 14 years ago

While I'm a Mac user and have used Safari every day for years, I gave it a quick try on my work Windows desktop when it first came out. Since the interface was so much slower than Firefox (probably due to all the custom drawing) I didn't bother to stick with it.

Apple has never really pushed Safari for Windows at all. The theory I've read that always made sense to me was that it was created to allow Windows developers to test pages without an iPhone (or later iPad).

But here we are a few years later and the cost of getting a Mac is lower than it was. Apple already has a ton more developers thanks to the iPhone and iPad. And if you just want to see "will my site look good on an iPhone" you can buy an iPod touch for ~$200.

I'm actually a bit surprised it took them this long. It clearly wasn't an important product for them.

Karunamon• 14 years ago

Only on a netbook. On a couple of Win7 loaded netbooks, safari seemed to use less memory and run noticeably faster than chrome, firefox, and yes IE.

I'd use it as a primary on those systems except for the fact that some of my essential extensions don't work on the windows version.

darrenkopp• 14 years ago

I install it when Apple says they've made it the fastest browser ever. Then I run the benchmarks and see that it isn't and uninstall it.

ansgri• 14 years ago

I've actually used it for almost a year, as a primary browser. One of the reasons was that it allows (allowed?) switching of font rendering engine to either Apple or Microsoft one. It was part of the experiment whether it's possible to live with a Mac with its extremely blurry though shape-preserving rendering.

Turns out they've bet on ultrahigh resolution displays, where their rendering is perfect.

coolnow• 14 years ago

Have you ever considered using GDIPP or Mactype? I used both, GDIPP doesn't work with Chrome so i switched to Mactype a few months back. Everything looks great, but in some situations, certain letters don't show up (like the lowercase "l") which happens very rarely.

cbsmith2• 14 years ago

The other way to go (which I've noticed most Mac people do go with) is comparatively larger fonts. As long as you are above 12px, the Apple font rendering not only looks nicer, but I seem to be able to read it faster.

Of course, I want 12px or smaller unless a display is really high DPI... ;-)

dspillett2• 14 years ago

> except for browser testing?

This is where dropping Windows support may harm Safari. Yes we can test against webkit via Chrome now so in theory anything that works on the current PC trinity (FF, Chrome, IE9+) should work just fine in Safari, any bugs that get raised by Safari users that can't be reproduced in Chrome are just going to get labelled "NONREPRO" or "WONTFIX". Chrome and Safari are not completely in-step so there could easily be the odd issue that affects one and not the other.

Admittedly this isn't a big problem for Apple users so the above concern isn't a killer: they can use FF or Chrome if Safari won't cooperate (though good luck convincing some users that switching browser is a valid workaround for any given bug).

JVIDEL• 14 years ago

I used Safari for Windows when it first came out, it was pretty good actually, but the later versions were a disaster, I don't know how but it ran like hell.

Somehow Apple managed to make Safari 5 slower than previous versions on Windows.

I can't exaggerate how unstable it was, it crashed all times and for no reason.

dshep• 14 years ago

Does anyone really care?

KwanEsq• 14 years ago

Wasn't the original point of Safari for Windows that all iOS apps were going to be in‐browser since Apple didn't want to allow the level of access for apps, so it was to allow more people to develop for the iPhone?

And then they went and made the app store and all that went out the window.

I'm surprised they didn't kill it a couple years back.

SCdF• 14 years ago

While I imagine next to no one uses Safari as their actual browser on Windows, it was nice that it was there so most cross browser testing could be done on one box.

Did Apple Just Quietly End Development Of Safari For Windows?

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