Safari text rendering on windows
Must be a slow year for products when Apple announces an awful port of a mediocre browser to another platform. Yes, I am a bit pissed at apple… they are the worst bundlers ever. I need quicktime to watch .mov files, it sucks, but I deal with it. Now when they do their update of quicktime it prompts me to install iTunes as well. I finally succumbed and installed itunes (which I now use and am fairly satisfied with). Will safari take the same route?
I don’t see how people get such a big kick out of text rendering in Safari…
If you ask me, safari is a train wreck on windows. It’s even slower and less responsive than itunes (which I am actually using on my vista machine at work). I have no idea how this (beta) product got past QA … unless it sucks as much on Mac.
No shadow, silly window handling, yuk…
June 13th, 2007 at 1:27 am
It made me consider that perhaps Apple aren’t really such a great company. I’m happy with my Mac but OS X has some terrible limitations.
Windows software always gets a bad rep when there’s bugs and ssecurity flaws but Apple’s software’s just as bad. It’s never publicized quite so much just because there’s less apple users out there.
June 13th, 2007 at 9:26 am
It begs to be said that the software is a beta, and a lot of other users have been pleased with Safari’s performance. So I imagine for the actual release we will see a version that has squashed all these bugs we’ve been hearing about.
Secondly, there is also an option to lessen the font aliasing. After seeing a lot of these comparison shots I realized why I always felt weird about text on Windows. It always looked too “computery” for me. While on a Mac, it just seems more pleasant to read.
As an example, look at the word “OS” in your screenshot. Notice how jagged the “S” is on both IE and FF and how smooth it is on Safari?
BTW, I wouldn’t call Safari (Mac) a mediocre browser. It has some of the best standards compliant rendering, its fast, and it has a sleek and unobtrusive design, not to mention the new improvements for v3. I’ve been using Safari almost exclusively over FF.
June 13th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
Gabe, I guess it’s just what you are used to.
As an example, when I see the ‘worthless’ on both safari firefox and IE. I have to honestly say that firefox looks the clearest on my screen. The elements are all the same, you can’t complain about any typographical elements, it’s just the clarity of the small text on my screen.
Having said that, I think headers and large text look MUCH better on safari. Text headers have always suffered under windows (I am saying this from a web design standpoint, where most of the time we are forced to use images since the text is so ugly).
About the speed, one thing that was snappy was opening new tabs.
One thing
June 13th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
Aaron Wormus, publishing broken sentences since 2002.
August 29th, 2007 at 10:30 am
Having switched to Safari for months, I recently tried to revert back to Firefox to see how it goes. Nope. Couldn’t stand the sight of the dysfunctional fonts. (Not Firefox’s problem, to be fair. It’s strictly Microsoft Cleartype.) Now I only wish Safari can come with the same plug-in versatility of Firefox and I’d be a happy camper.