The *real* "Safari for Windows"
patrick — Mon, 2007-06-11 18:18
I wanted to post this when I found out about it, but I ended up going through several reboots & network issues that I still haven't figured out yet.
Last August I was kind of late in reporting on the Swift browser in Safari for Windows. Swift was someone's attempt to get a semi-working version of WebKit ported to Windows so that us web developers could see what people using Mac's Safari browser were seeing. It was not usable as a browser, but I don't think that was what it's purpose was.
Today, however, Apple launched Safari 3 Public Beta... for Windows! It is a Beta & from the troubles we ran into trying to get this working I suggest you close all currently running programs including those minimized to tray icons. At work we're forced to use Lotus Notes & Sametime, both of these needed to be closed as well as Firefox, IE, & Opera.
The person that initially pointed this out to us hasn't had any problems as far as I know. The guy that pointed it out to me was having issues only after having connected to the apple.com website & then trying to follow a link. I seemed to be ok as long as I didn't connect to apple.com, unfortunately the default home page is http://www.apple.com/startpage/ & it would get the page about half loaded before it seemed to shut down my network connection - even Firefox, IE, & Opera were unable to connect after Safari started.
The real test was once I actually got somewhere. I ended up at iGoogle & within 2 minutes Safari crashed. I clicked the windows debug button & got nothing. I spent the rest of the afternoon messing around installing & uninstalling, rebooting, making sure that absolutely nothing was listed in the processes window of Task Manager & I was still ending up with either Safari crashing or seeming to cause the network to lock up.
All of us at work are using Windows XP & are behind a content blocking proxy. I'm not sure how much of the network locking up is the proxy's fault & how much is because of Safari. At this point I've kind of given up on the beta at least on my work machine until an update comes along. I'll try again at home at some point, it'll be interesting to see if it will work under wine.
