This post is about a browser called Swift which uses the WebKit rendering engine. Apple has since then released a real Safari version for Windows.
Get Swift or something like that. If the installer doesn’t work it’s probably because you haven’t installed vcredist_x86.exe. Fortunately you can download the installer for vcredist_x86.exe. Having done so and typing in annevankesteren.nl followed by Enter in the address bar I get:
Got to love pages labeled as UTF-8 being interpreted as ISO-8859-1 or simply Windows-1252. Now I know Safari makes garbage of The Björn Höhrmann Project, but I thought that was limited to XML pages. Perhaps something went wrong when converting things to Windows.
Regarding Swift, it really is 0.1. Keyboard navigation doesn’t work, radio buttons on the Norwegian Google homepage don’t work and lots of the user interface feels broken. It also misses view source, context menus, et cetera.
Yay Anne! I couldn't get Swift to install until now. Thanks! :-)
I'm glad someone has finally decided to port this over. I don't have a Mac so testing web sites in Safari can be a real problem sometimes (I've been using the Safari tester at http://www.browsrcamp.com/).
However, I see that there is still much work to do. Many of the sites I visited caused the application to crash. My personal web site (which is just a contact form at the moment) crashes everytime -- perhaps something to do with the form styling? Anyway, I'll keep a close eye on the development of this project.
Thanks for the post, Anne.
Hehe, as long as they stay up to date with webkit it's all good!
Thomas, wouldn't testing a website in Konqueror be a sufficient alternative to test it in Safari? They are both based on KHTML and should render most things the same way. To install it on Windows, it seems that Cygwin and KDE-Cygwin or coLinux are the best options.
As to the idea of having Safari on Windows for other purposes than testing... Well, to each his own I guess. I would probably hate its interface just as much as I hate the QuickTime interface on Windows. It just doesn't belong there.
Asbjørn, it is only the engine, for the rest it is a normal Windows application (the buttons do look ugly though). And well, a normal Windows application belongs more than Cygwin in my opinion. =)
Hmm. The WebKit bug has been marked fixed, but the page still shows up wrong in the latest nightly. I wonder if the comment before the root element trips WebKit over.
For further brokenness, see how Google lists The Project.
Asbjørn, I wouldn’t count on Konqueror and Safari being in sync.
Yup, it is very broken. But better than nothing I guess… :-P
Thanks for this Anne! I see your site doesn't show the image in this post. And all the text is wrong for encoded characters.
I can't get it to open local files though. At first I got a black screen and it froze. Now all it goes is open Google instead.
I quite like the buttons though. Much nicer than IE7! No, really. A pity it doesn't have the smooth fonts of Safari on Mac though. (Impossible, I know.)
I would be nice if someone could port WebKit as a Firefox extenstion. Then I could just open a page in a WebKit tab inside Firefox.
Wonderful news! Can’t have enough platforms to test on.
~Grauw
Just to let you know Swift 0.2 will ask for dot Net Framework 2.0
I downloaded Safari for Vista and discovered once again the Jobs' claims for exceptional performance were false. It's no faster than IE or Mozilla and the interface is just plain awful and clumsy.
I am NOT an Apple fan boy, but the Safari performance claims are quite substantiated in my testing on XP. It is blowing the doors off IE in my testing. However, that said, there are some serious bugs in the handling of mouse events. These bugs are NOT in the Mac version of the Safari 3 beta, so, there is clearly something up with the windows side of the code.