Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null
Safari is Apple's own web browser for OS X, and it's one nice piece of software, especially when you consider the fact that it's still (as of June 17th 2003) in the beta stages. It's a nice compact browser that for some reason (integration with the rest of the iLife software I suspect) sports the brushed metal look. Nothing really wrong with that, but every time I fire up another browser (which isn't often at all) I'm surprised by how bright their windows look.
One thing that makes Safari cooler from a browser geek's standpoint is the rendering engine it uses. Rendering engines are the pasts of browsers that handle the actual HTML (and other things like JavaScript too for that matter) interpretation and drawing it in a nice way on the screen, and there are a lot fewer rendering engines than web browsers out there. Internet Explorer, Opera and Mozilla have their own rendering engines (Mozilla's is called Gecko), and many people build their browsers on one of those (IE and Gecko mainly).
The Safari developers took a sharp left turn and chose to go with the much less known KHTML engine. KHTML is used by the Konqueror web browser for the Linux desktop KDE, and the reason stated for picking it over Mozilla or something else (some people in the Mozilla community were a bit upset about it) was compactness.
When it comes to rendering pages properly, KHTML/Safari sure doesn't seem to be lagging behind anyone. The standard support seems to be great, and I have several times made page layouts (following the standards, no voodoo involved) that looked best in Safari but needed more or less severe tweaking to work as well in the other browsers (*cough*, IE, *cough*).
Safari is meant to be small and fast, and I say it accomplishes that. You can make the interface nicely small and space saving, and it's got a tabbed interface that we all love and can't live without by now. It doesn't save the tabs when you exit the program though, and that's something I miss. I realize just now that this is probably along the lines of Apple's user interface guidelines, but I still like having the same tabs back when I reopen Safari after a restart due to software updates.
We all know how much everyone appreciates Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer with Windows, and what it did to Netscape. So, it can't be a good thing if Apple starts bundling Safari with OS X, right? Opera complained early on if I'm not mistaken. I for one think that bundling Safari will at least be a huge step forward over bundling IE with Macs! Yes, that's the situation now. IE comes preinstalled and is the default browser. I got myself Camino right away, and I've never looked back to IE other than for the most compatibility-challenged of websites. After getting Safari IE's been even more distanced from everyday use, now it's Camino I go to for the odd time when Safari doesn't do something quite right yet.
Anyway. back to the competition issue. I'm kind of split on this, but it's probably from being used to free browsers so long. I think Apple needs a browser with the OS, and Safari is a great deal nicer than IE. But I do want other browsers around as well. In my own best-case scenario, Safari is the entry level browser that does all the basics and does them fast and easy. Other browsers pack all the extras people like when they get more advanced. I think this may be the plan from Apple as well, or at least I hope so because it seems really bad to kill off all other browser makers on the platform. On the other hand, if Opera can survive in the Windows world, then why should it be any different on the Mac?
(Yeah, I know the market size matters.)
(Ironically, this page got the ID 404 ...)