Please Note: My personal journal is now fully independent of my main personal Web site, but I am still working on some things such as my new page designs and many improvements to PageDrive, my software that runs my journal site. If you encounter any technical problems, please either just try again a while later or let me know.
I am posting this from the public beta version of Safari 3.0 (522.11.3) for Windows under the 64-bit version of Windows Vista Home Premium. Its installer installed it to my "Program Files (x86)" folder rather than my main "Program Files" folder, so it seems that as with iTunes, Apple is not yet able or willing to accept and advocate 64-bit computing under Windows despite embracing 64-bit hardware and software for Macs. It does work, though.
Even running on Windows, Safari looks very much like a Mac application, with its custom window design and its Aqua form elements. The presence of not only reliable maximization, but docking maximization is an improvment over any Mac OS X version of Safari that I have ever used (I have not yet tried a beta version of Safari 3.0 for Mac OS X), but that is true for all applications that use built-in operating system functionality for such window operations and settle for Apple's zooming instead of the docking maximization that is offered by Windows, GNOME, and KDE (and probably many others). In this way, at least, the Windows version of Safari actually seems to be better than its Mac OS X counterpart.
One area in which Safari falls short of other browsers is in its lack of a full-screen mode. If my memory serves me correctly, this feature is also curiously absent from the Mac OS X version of Firefox, but it is a standard feature available in most graphical browsers on most platforms and I would like to see it offered by Safari on both platforms.
Another Safari oddity is that its status bar is turned off by default, so if you hover your mouse pointer over a link that appears innocuous, but leads to a malicious URL, you are denied the opportunity to recognize the potential threat by seeing the URL before you load it. Opera does the same thing and I wish both browser vendors would turn their status bars on by default in the names of both security and privacy.
I have already reported two rendering issues and one preferences window issue via Safari's built-in bug-reporting system. The first rendering issue manifests the first time the style switcher at my personal Web site is used (Opera fails similarly), but the second is immediately apparent as Safari displays extra vertical space below some list-item tabs on two of my other Web sites (Opera does not display that vertical extra space, but it does overlap the tabs horizontally). The preferences window issue was simply that my default Web browser was incorrectly listed as being Internet Explorer rather than Firefox.
Safari stopped responding to Windows for quite a while when submitting a bug report (it eventually responded, which was relieving since it meant that I did not lose this entry) and I just saw a minor and short-lived rendering corruption at the bottom left corner of the text area in which I am now typing, but I have not yet reported these things because I would first like to know whether they are reproduceable so I can provide the developers with as much relevant information as possible. And, of course, I do not want to risk crashing Safari and losing this whole entry.
I have been meaning to add a draft-saving feature to PageDrive Journalist for some time. Perhaps I will do so soon.
To a Web developer, another major browser means another major browser to test and potentially, to accommodate with distasteful hacks when browser-specific bugs arise, so I hope Apple stays on top of standards support and maintains as much parity as possible between the Mac version of Safari and the Windows version. This could be great news for Web users and Web developers alike on all platforms if Apple manages to lure users from Internet Explorer to Safari, changing the balance of people using reasonably standards compliant browsers and people using Internet Explorer, which I must insist has very poor standards support despite Jeffrey Zeldman's overly kind words to the contrary in his second edition of Designing With Web Standards. And yes, that includes Windows Internet Windows Explorer 7 for Windows, Windows Edition.
Browsers such as Firefox and Opera have have had some success against Internet Explorer and I hope they will continue to do so. Apple has an advantage no other browser vendor can claim, though: a huge installed base of both iTunes and QuickTime on both Mac OS X and Windows. Microsoft has competing media software in its Windows Media Player and its proprietary file formats with little or no support on platforms other than Windows, sure, but in iTunes and QuickTime, Apple has high quality, cross-platform, and popular offerings accompanied by good reputations and great marketing, so the scope and potential of Apple's browser ambitions should not be underestimated. This is going to be interesting.
