Safari For Windows
June 13th, 2007Just to prove that I’m not cranky about everything that came out of the keynote on Monday, I’d like to say that I’m very excited about the release of Safari for Windows!
I think Safari is a very serious contender in these new browser wars. It will be interesting to see whether they take more market share from FireFox or IE. My first thoughts? Safari wins.
My only real misgiving about this is the decision to use Apple’s font-smoothing techniques in Safari on Windows. Joel Spolsky wrote about the differences in great detail, and I’m not entirely convinced that I don’t prefer the Windows smoothing for its legibility. I am certainly convinced that if I like my Mac’s smoothing better, it’s probably mostly out of familiarity, and not a proof that the technology is better.
It seems a bit crude to push an alien font-smoothing technique on a massive pool of new customers. It will certainly make it stand apart from other Windows apps, though.
June 14th, 2007 at 2:25 pm
Assuming that a big part of the motivation for releasing Safari for Windows is to make it easy to test sites on, I personally think you’d want to keep the rendering as identical as possible across platforms. That includes font metrics.
From what remember, this is something Mac Office has had to deal with over the years when rendering type in Word documents.
June 14th, 2007 at 5:43 pm
I’m pretty certain that Apple’s rendering is better. Why? Because Microsoft’s adjustments to the characters mess up the delicate balance of spacing in the font and as a result I think text often looks messy on Windows.
I should qualify that by saying that I’ve always thought that, even before I came to the Mac, so this isn’t just fanboyism, it’s that I have a genuine dislike of the distortions that are introduced (not to mention the fact that it typically breaks WYSIWYG to some degree for Windows apps). Of course, on Windows the effect isn’t too bad for Microsoft’s own fonts, because they went to great lengths to ensure that they were well hinted, but it’s often pretty objectionable for third-party fonts.
Of course, I can imagine Windows users being a bit perplexed at the sudden difference in rendering. It’ll be interesting to see how many users are attracted to the Safari browser on that platform.
June 19th, 2007 at 1:24 am
alastair, it might be helpful to know that there are two different 2D rendering technologies in Windows–GDI and GDI+. GDI+ has a cleaner, more modern API but is notoriously wacky in the way it spaces out text onscreen, especially with ClearType enabled. Most apps use GDI drawing most of the time but if you’ve just occasionally seen the “messiness” then it is probably GDI+. When it occurs, the distortion is NOT subtle to anyone who has any kind of background in desktop publishing or typography.
GDI text doesn’t suffer from these problems. And it looks especially good on Vista. Comparing XP to Tiger seemed like a matter of preference to me–sharper vs. softer–but Vista’s subpixel rendering, especially at smaller font sizes, is a genuine leap forward. It makes me feel like I’m using a higher-res monitor.
Under XP, I used to use a bitmap font for programming (ProFont) and often had ClearType turned off altogether, but with Vista I haven’t felt the need at all.
I think the really interesting question is IF Windows users hate the Mac-style text rendering, will Apple switch to Windows-style text, or even provide a preference? Seems very un-Steve to me.
June 21st, 2007 at 3:15 pm
I posted about my experiences with Safari a couple of days ago, and I’m sorry to say I don’t like it. I’m an Apple fan, and don’t go for starting ‘religious’ wars, but I think it was a mistake to try to shoehorn Apple fonts and application styling into a windows release.
Also, I had some major performance issues with Safari on my XP laptop. I’d be interested to hear from anyone else who experienced these.