Jun | 12 | 2007

Template Designers Get Ready: Safari 3 for Windows is coming

Talk about getting your head in the game.

As if testing on two browsers is not enough (or three, for Opera, so stop writing that email now! I get flamed enough already, thank you), Apple sets loose its flagship browser onto Windows machines in WWDC07 in an effort to what can be interpreted as a move to increase awareness of the Apple experience. Or, in El Jobso’s own words, “giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell”.

In case you lost track already, here’s a quick review at what we have now:

the Gecko engine (utilized by Mozilla sea monkey suite, Firefox and Camino);
WebCore, or WebKit, or KHTML, depending on whom you ask, from Konqueror, from which Safari nicked; and of course:
the unimaginatively named Microsoft HTML engine, the very bowels of Microsoft’s operating systems since Windows 95

Thankfully for us, static pages are old and forgotten, and we embrace the magic of PHP and push, dynamic content. Gone are the days when you have to worry about image placement on each and every page, and how they’d look like on every platform out there.

Reversely, the process of working with slicing images, and the intricacies of getting white spaces and implicit border overheads in the code to correctly display - have not changed much. Bright side: you now only have to get just one “template” page correctly (e.g., in Wordpress, this is the single.php file).

The Safari for Windows Beta is very much that - a beta. It being released in a developer (and not a consumer) conference, it’s just enough to allow developers and designers (and loving bloggers looking out for the <10% of hits from Safari users!) do some testing and gauge just how WebKit-friendly their sites are, even if Firefox is still the de facto browser of the blogging crowd in either Windows or Mac. I have yet to find technical documentation on the differences (or identicalness) of the Windows from the native Mac OS version though.

Download Safari 3 for Windows BETA here.

6 Responses

Jeff Villafranca
12|Jun|2007

Am I imagining things?!? The lists are not spilling over the borders now!! Great work, J. Angelo!
Ia Lucero
12|Jun|2007

Gadzooki still needs some fixing, though. BTW, I happened to have written a post about Safari there as well!
Jeff Villafranca
12|Jun|2007

I beat you to it by 15 hours! bwahaha

this post:

Gadzooki post:

I’m not a big designer myself, except for applying shims for squishing rendering quirks here and there. But pushing Safari’s user base would result to more impetus for designers to actually bother testing for Safari
Ia Lucero
13|Jun|2007

LOL! It took me forever to finish that Safari post on Gadzooki, I’ll give you that.
J. Angelo Racoma
14|Jun|2007

It was an issue with un-closed DIV tags, Jeff. Confusion usually ensues when you mix if/then statements with div tags. Apparently, Firefox doesn’t mind (and sometimes even IE!), so we usually don’t notice.

That’s one good thing with having Safari on Windows. One more platform to test sites on–without having to buy a Mac!
J. Angelo Racoma
14|Jun|2007

BTW, Ia, I already fixed that issue on Gadzooki. Or is it still there? Care to send me a screenshot?

Our Features

Design and Themes

Is Your Blog W3C Compliant?

Last night I checked my personal blog’s code hoping I can proudly display the W3C Validated Button. Since I use Blogger and do not really do anything to clean up the code (beyond adding Alt-tags to the images I embed) I wasn’t surprised at all to find that my blog contained lots of errors - [...]
Read on
More Design and Themes Features
Software and Widgets

Wordpress Plug-ins

If you blog using Wordpress and can’t do something that you want done like adding Sphere-related content at the end of your blog posts you might be surprised to find out that there are already plug-ins available that make it happen.
To find good Wordpress plug-ins all you need to do is search for “wordpress [...]
Read on
More Software and Widgets Features
Reviews

A Friend In Need

I’m helping out my friends from the UA&P - IShareHappiness Blog Team.
Whenever you feel pessimistic, angry, troubled, frustrated, and depressed – what have you – you need someone to talk to. Someone who could help you be more optimistic and help make you feel that there is hope. Sometimes it’s hard to talk to someone [...]
Read on
More Blog Reviews
Monetization

Making Money Through Consumer Generated Ads

As I mentioned in my previous post today I will be suggesting some ways you can still profit by joining programs such as Pay Per Post and yet ensure that your readers don’t get turned off.
In my opinion the only way to really do this is by making sure that your blog entries stay [...]
Read on
More Monetization Features
Marketing and Search Optimization

Building your blog brand step by step

Building your blog’s brand does not need to be difficult. However, when it comes to branding you should always remember to exert effort to be consistent with the image you wish to portray or you’ll end up with confused, turned-off, and/or skeptical readers. Branding inconsistencies will make it obvious that the image you’re putting up [...]
Read on
More Marketing and SEO Features
Blog Resources