8 ms·

Did Apple Just Quietly End Development Of Safari For Windows?

73 points by Achshar 14y ago

barca_fan 14y ago
breaking news!
- 404error 14y ago
  Barca!
masklinn 14y ago
It would seem they also dropped Snow Leopard support. Not entirely unexpected, but potentially bothersome nonetheless.
- statictype 14y ago
  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.
dav-id 14y ago
Looks like I will have to start using IE then
icefox 14y ago
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.
- MatthewPhillips 14y ago
  I don't know about you, but testing on Chrome and assuming it will also work on Safari is far from "good enough" for me.
  - darklajid 14y ago
    I've never been a Safari user, on any platform. Can you tell me if Safari on Windows was a reasonable way to test for Safari compatibility - or was it too far off from the 'real thing' so that you really test 'Safari on Windows or devices that weren't turned on for years' if you run it on a Windows based dev machine?
    - msbarnett 14y ago
      To give you an idea: Safari on Windows was pretty often criticized for having ported over the entire OS X font rendering engine (so it looked pretty wildly out of place on Windows), but that was part of what made it a fairly accurate rendition of what it looked like under OS X. There were still discrepancies even then, sadly.
      - Kerrick 14y ago
        That font rendering engine was the main reason I used Safari for Windows for so long. I absolutely love it.
  - masklinn 14y ago
    On the other hand, testing on Safari/Windows did not ensure it'd work flawlessly in Safari/OSX (still a whole lot better than taking Chrome as a good enough approximation though)
    - andrewfelix 14y ago
      So true. Ran into a few Mac Safari issues that weren't visible in Windows. I now run a Mac VM to test, which has the added benefit of an iOS emulator.
- ditoa 14y ago
  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.
  - icefox 14y ago
    Safari for Windows came out in summer of 2007, Google Chrome came out in September of 2008. Granted Chrome development started in 2006ish which was probably around the time Safari for Windows started. By the time Safari for windows was released those in the WebKit community knew Google was up to something, but didn't know a timetable, any details etc and from discussions they tossed out the first version so when Safari for Windows was released perhaps Google Chrome as we know it today was just starting. Looking at it from a business perspective or even just a 2006 perspective Apple's move makes a lot of sense. Edit: Some of my memories are a bit fuzzy about what was going on exactly when in relation to everything else so feel free to correct any mistakes in the above.
  - bhousel 14y ago
    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 14y ago
      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 14y ago
        > 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.
efalcao 14y ago
Meh. Safari's only utility on OS X is to install Chrome. IE fills that role on the Windows systems.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- nicholassmith 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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 14y ago
      What do you mean by "hiding habits"?
      - Jtsummers 14y ago
        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.
    - nicholassmith 14y ago
      The hiding habit used to bug me, but then I started splitting windows of tabs out into logical groups and it bugged me less. It's still the worst aspect of Safari though.
- jfb 14y ago
  Different strokes for different folks. I don't like Chrome and am perfectly well served by Safari.
kalleboo 14y ago
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.
laconian 14y ago
Meta-comment: why do tech blogs punch-up headlines with words like "just" and questionmarks?
- bcbrown 14y ago
  Because it gets them pageviews.
- rwhitman 14y ago
  Because they have no sources or comment from the company, and the entire article is speculation based on poking around the apple website
olleicua 14y ago
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 14y ago
  Really though Apple and Microsoft need to both just accept that they lost the browser war and ship with Chrome or Firefox.
  - pooriaazimi 14y ago
    Safari on OS X is excellent. It was complete garbage on windows, but safari 4+ on OS X is an ideal browser IMO.
  - eridius 14y ago
    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 14y ago
      Apple created "WebKit", but before it was WebKit it was KHTML. Let's not lose sight of history here.
      - eridius 14y ago
        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 14y ago
        Nonless you are still wrong to say that "Apple created WebKit" as the WebKit source code was a fork from the KTHML source code.
melling 14y ago
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.
kmfrk 14y ago
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.
crazygringo 14y ago
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?
- DrJokepu 14y ago
  Safari for Windows was released more than a year before the first Google Chrome beta. Before that, Webkit wasn't available on Windows at all and it was impossible to test websites on Webkit without a Mac. Google Chrome is now an excellent and widespread browser on Windows so there's no point maintaining Safari for Windows anymore.
  - randomdata 14y ago
    I have encountered more than one bug that exists in either Chrome or Safari, but not both. If you only test using Chrome on Windows, you still won't really know how it will behave in Safari.
    - MartinCron 14y ago
      Curious, are these behavior bugs (expected) or rendering bugs (less so)?
      - cbsmith 14y ago
        A lot of it is from Safari basically being on its own branch that is occasionally synced with the open source WebKit.
- andrewfelix 14y ago
  I was using it before Chrome arrived. But the font rendering was jarringly out of place in a Windows context.
- MBCook 14y ago
JVIDEL 14y ago
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.
dshep 14y ago
Does anyone really care?
KwanEsq 14y ago
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.
SCdF 14y ago
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.

73 points by Achshar 14y ago

barca_fan 14y ago

breaking news!

404error 14y ago
Barca!

masklinn 14y ago

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

statictype 14y ago
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.

dav-id 14y ago

Looks like I will have to start using IE then

icefox 14y ago

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.

MatthewPhillips 14y ago
I don't know about you, but testing on Chrome and assuming it will also work on Safari is far from "good enough" for me.
- darklajid 14y ago
  I've never been a Safari user, on any platform. Can you tell me if Safari on Windows was a reasonable way to test for Safari compatibility - or was it too far off from the 'real thing' so that you really test 'Safari on Windows or devices that weren't turned on for years' if you run it on a Windows based dev machine?
  - msbarnett 14y ago
    To give you an idea: Safari on Windows was pretty often criticized for having ported over the entire OS X font rendering engine (so it looked pretty wildly out of place on Windows), but that was part of what made it a fairly accurate rendition of what it looked like under OS X. There were still discrepancies even then, sadly.
    - Kerrick 14y ago
      That font rendering engine was the main reason I used Safari for Windows for so long. I absolutely love it.
- masklinn 14y ago
  On the other hand, testing on Safari/Windows did not ensure it'd work flawlessly in Safari/OSX (still a whole lot better than taking Chrome as a good enough approximation though)
  - andrewfelix 14y ago
    So true. Ran into a few Mac Safari issues that weren't visible in Windows. I now run a Mac VM to test, which has the added benefit of an iOS emulator.
ditoa 14y ago
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.
- icefox 14y ago
  Safari for Windows came out in summer of 2007, Google Chrome came out in September of 2008. Granted Chrome development started in 2006ish which was probably around the time Safari for Windows started. By the time Safari for windows was released those in the WebKit community knew Google was up to something, but didn't know a timetable, any details etc and from discussions they tossed out the first version so when Safari for Windows was released perhaps Google Chrome as we know it today was just starting. Looking at it from a business perspective or even just a 2006 perspective Apple's move makes a lot of sense. Edit: Some of my memories are a bit fuzzy about what was going on exactly when in relation to everything else so feel free to correct any mistakes in the above.
- bhousel 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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 14y ago
      > 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.

efalcao 14y ago

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

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
nicholassmith 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    What do you mean by "hiding habits"?
    - Jtsummers 14y ago
      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.
  - nicholassmith 14y ago
    The hiding habit used to bug me, but then I started splitting windows of tabs out into logical groups and it bugged me less. It's still the worst aspect of Safari though.
jfb 14y ago
Different strokes for different folks. I don't like Chrome and am perfectly well served by Safari.

kalleboo 14y ago

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.

laconian 14y ago

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

bcbrown 14y ago
Because it gets them pageviews.
rwhitman 14y ago
Because they have no sources or comment from the company, and the entire article is speculation based on poking around the apple website

olleicua 14y ago

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 14y ago
Really though Apple and Microsoft need to both just accept that they lost the browser war and ship with Chrome or Firefox.
- pooriaazimi 14y ago
  Safari on OS X is excellent. It was complete garbage on windows, but safari 4+ on OS X is an ideal browser IMO.
- eridius 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    Apple created "WebKit", but before it was WebKit it was KHTML. Let's not lose sight of history here.
    - eridius 14y ago
      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 14y ago
        Nonless you are still wrong to say that "Apple created WebKit" as the WebKit source code was a fork from the KTHML source code.

melling 14y ago

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.

kmfrk 14y ago

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.

crazygringo 14y ago

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?

DrJokepu 14y ago
Safari for Windows was released more than a year before the first Google Chrome beta. Before that, Webkit wasn't available on Windows at all and it was impossible to test websites on Webkit without a Mac. Google Chrome is now an excellent and widespread browser on Windows so there's no point maintaining Safari for Windows anymore.
- randomdata 14y ago
  I have encountered more than one bug that exists in either Chrome or Safari, but not both. If you only test using Chrome on Windows, you still won't really know how it will behave in Safari.
  - MartinCron 14y ago
    Curious, are these behavior bugs (expected) or rendering bugs (less so)?
    - cbsmith 14y ago
      A lot of it is from Safari basically being on its own branch that is occasionally synced with the open source WebKit.
andrewfelix 14y ago
I was using it before Chrome arrived. But the font rendering was jarringly out of place in a Windows context.
MBCook 14y ago

JVIDEL 14y ago

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.

dshep 14y ago

Does anyone really care?

KwanEsq 14y ago

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.

SCdF 14y ago

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.