

Did Apple Just Quietly End Development Of Safari For Windows? - Achshar
http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/25/apple-safari-for-windows-ends/

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crazygringo
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?

~~~
ansgri
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.

~~~
cbsmith
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... ;-)

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icefox
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.

~~~
ditoa
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.

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bhousel
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.

~~~
krakensden
They're not required to submit patches, only release code to people you've
distributed binaries to. So before Chrome was released, they didn't have to
release anything.

~~~
dspillett
_> So before Chrome was released, they didn't have to release anything_

They did. While LGPL doesn't mean you need to release all your project's code
to users if they request it, it does mean you need to release any
modifications of the parts covered by the LGPL.

They didn't have to release the changes in any way that made them _easy_ to
reintegrate with the mainline version, but they did have to release them
somehow if requested to do so by a Chrome user.

Even the full GPL doesn't require you to automatically release your code back
to the original source, it only states that you must provide the source to the
people you distribute your product too if they request that you do.

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

~~~
statictype
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.

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

~~~
nicholassmith
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.

~~~
masklinn
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.

~~~
othermaciej
What do you mean by "hiding habits"?

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Jtsummers
After some number of tabs are opened (depending on window width) the rest
aren't accessible as tabs, but from a drop down list of all the tabs.

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kmfrk
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.

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kalleboo
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.

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

~~~
bcbrown
Because it gets them pageviews.

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KwanEsq
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.

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melling
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.

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olleicua
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.

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

~~~
eridius
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?

~~~
djur
Apple created "WebKit", but before it was WebKit it was KHTML. Let's not lose
sight of history here.

~~~
eridius
And KHTML was based on the KDE HTML Widget. There's always prior work. But
that's not particularly relevant to my point that it makes absolutely zero
sense for Apple to discontinue their browser.

~~~
icefox
Nonless you are still wrong to say that "Apple created WebKit" as the WebKit
source code was a fork from the KTHML source code.

~~~
eridius
Really? Without Apple, "WebKit" would literally not exist. Apple created the
project. The code itself was a fork of KHTML, but I'm not talking about the
code, I'm talking about the project.

~~~
icefox
Created is a very strong word to toss around especially in this context.
Perhaps you were only referring to the trademark WebKit which Apple did
register (but they did offered to have the community manage it at the start if
I recall). WebKit literally wouldn't exists without the KHTML developers who
were in discussions with Apple and the result of which was the WebKit project.
Here on HN where code is first class and many others have incorrectly stated
that Apple coded/created/built all of WebKit and they knew nothing of KHTML it
is really no surprise that someone would try to correct you when you stated
the "Apple created WebKit". Creating something isn't the guy that happen to
register the trademark, it is the guys that wrote the code in this context.

~~~
eridius
Who cares about the trademark? The WebKit project is what I'm talking about.
KHTML would not have gone on to become an incredibly popular cross-platform,
cross-device, cross-company framework for web rendering if Apple hadn't
started the WebKit project. It would have remained nothing more than a web
rendering engine for KDE.

Code may be important, but it's not the only thing that matters. You could
write the most beautiful, efficient, useful code in the world and it wouldn't
matter if nobody ever saw it.

Besides, this is straying further and further from the point that Apple ships
and maintains a web rendering engine as a core component of the system. It's
so firmly embedded that it actually powers most text rendering on iOS. In
light of this, saying Apple should discontinue their browser which is built
upon this engine is preposterous.

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dav-id
Looks like I will have to start using IE then

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JVIDEL
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.

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SCdF
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.

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dshep
Does anyone really care?

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barca_fan
breaking news!

~~~
404error
Barca!

