Safari for Windows Downloads Top 1 Million In 48 Hours

[thomasfxlt]

Yes it has bugs, but I think your experience is not representative of the general base. I will deal with its shortcomings because I like it so much more than FF or IE.

Thank you Apple!

It may seem like I'm off-topic, but I'm not. I don't know how many of these sites you monitor, but I've been checking this and many others regularly for many years now. There is an increasing influx of Apple bashers over the last few months posting on issues that are easily missunderstood and spun into a negative light. I use this and other sites to try and keep a grip on Apple and their vision.

I just fear that this forum could end up like the Apple discussions on Yahoo and the like where the Wall Street crowd troll on a daily basis.

MS Safari is a beta release. What's the big surprise with the bugs?

 

[clevin]

1. opera had 1m in 48hrs at version 8, their CEO tried to swim through atlantic ocean for celebration, mission aborted after he got in water for.... couple of hrs?

2. firefox had 2m in 48hrs at version 2.0

3. >85% safari windows download end up in trash can

4. large number of download means large amount of bad impression for this beta, remember firefox 2 and opera 9 are not bug plagued versions.

 

[0098386]

I'm in 2 minds about this.

Safari XP is great, a visual splendor compared to IE7. Tabs=awesome. Etc. But you cant enter a blank address for the homepage (which really speeds things up for me on the Mac side). And sometimes the automatic "guessing" of addresses goes really funky messy style.

Beats IE7 though! Oh yesh.

 

[barnettgs]

impressive, but i wonder how many of them actually use it

The same can be said for other browsers too...

 

[barnettgs]

1. opera had 1m in 48hrs at version 9, their CEO tried to swim through atlantic ocean for celebration, mission aborted after he got in water for.... couple of hrs?

2. firefox had 2m in 48hrs at version 2.0

3. >85% safari windows download end up in trash can

4. large number of download means large amount of bad impression for this beta, remember firefox 2 and opera 9 are not bug plagued versions.

Says the Netscape fanboy.

 

[clevin]

Says the Netscape fanboy.

so many apple fanboys, one netscape fanboy isn't too much here, is it? Im not claiming million netscape download anyway, I admit the fact netscape is a dying product, now what. LOL

 

[CoreWeb]

It may seem like I'm off-topic, but I'm not. I don't know how many of these sites you monitor, but I've been checking this and many others regularly for many years now. There is an increasing influx of Apple bashers over the last few months posting on issues that are easily missunderstood and spun into a negative light. I use this and other sites to try and keep a grip on Apple and their vision.

I just fear that this forum could end up like the Apple discussions on Yahoo and the like where the Wall Street crowd troll on a daily basis.

MS Safari is a beta release. What's the big surprise with the bugs?

Though, from what I can tell, a lot of these Apple-bashers are actually so-called "Apple-lovers". It seems to me that Apple-lovers are the ones who hate Apple most. Kind of odd.

Safari 3 for Windows worked fine for me, though I thought for sure it would crash. Obviously there are bugs, but this is quite understandable, not only because it is a beta project, but also because of the complexity of moving the Safari browser from Mac to Windows. Apple did not simply copy iTunes's interface code, from what I can tell. It appears almost as if Apple literally compiled a Cocoa program for Mac. A few Mac frameworks appear to have been ported to windows, including CoreFoundation. So it seems like this could have been quite the undertaking.

So, I am quite impressed, really.

 

[rjwill246]

1. opera had 1m in 48hrs at version 9, their CEO tried to swim through atlantic ocean for celebration, mission aborted after he got in water for.... couple of hrs?

2. firefox had 2m in 48hrs at version 2.0

3. >85% safari windows download end up in trash can

4. large number of download means large amount of bad impression for this beta, remember firefox 2 and opera 9 are not bug plagued versions.

Your English is as tangled as your medullary and cortical fibres seem to be. Perhaps you could write something factual and sensible? Indeed, Firefox on the Mac is not entirely bug free and crashes quite frequently for me. And I have NO third party add-ons in the OS at all.

btw, Please assure us that you are not a typical PC user. Then again,---- I ask too much.

 

[clevin]

Your English is as tangled as your medullary and cortical fibres seem to be. Perhaps you could write something factual and sensible? Indeed, Firefox on the Mac is not entirely bug free and crashes quite frequently for me. And I have NO third party add-ons in the OS at all.

btw, Please assure us that you are not a typical PC user. Then again,---- I ask too much.

haha, Im a typical pc user? whatever

70% of firefox's downloads end up in trash can, consider the pre-alpha quality of safari for win, 85% is a very kind number already.

 

[Kenn Marks]

That's so nice of you.. I wanted to say the same thing, so I don't even have to type it myself. Only thing different, I wanted to say it about the Mac ;-)

EDIT: I love my Mac, but I don't really understand how a Mac user who's a little bit of honesty left can call Windows more proprietary than Mac OS X.. the latter is even bound to the hardware. Needless to say there's no (easy) way to transfer all that songs bought from iTunes to Windows Media player.. while there's Microsoft Office for the Mac, I haven't seen an implementation of iWork so far.. is there a way to run my Keynote presentations on Windows if my Powerbook battery is empty and I forgot my charger, and everybody in the audience just has a Windows laptop?

Sure there is a way to run your keynote presentations on a PC, I do it all the time, save it as an interactive quicktime video. The only downside is if your presentation has imbedded video clips they do not like the double compression and come out pretty crappy. As for the iTunes to Windows Media that's what DRM is for to not make it easy. As for iWork you could still get a copy of AppleWorks for Windows if you have access to the Academic Store.

 

[donlphi]

Not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing...

The strategy makes sense to precede the iPhone, etc., but it can't be good for many potential switchers' first "MacOS" experience to be on what appears to be an unstable beta on Windows.

I tend to reply to whatever is on the first page, so don't mind me if this topic has been beaten to death...

I agree with the statement above, but I don't think most switchers are people testing software. I think most switchers are people that went out and bought their first computer (or second or whatever) for a "GREAT PRICE" not knowing they bought something that was obsolete 3 years before it came into the store.

Got tired of the bugs and viruses and heard that Macs don't have viruses or have less viruses, so they decided since you can check your e-mail and browse the internet on a mac, the only difference was going to be less money spent on anti-virus software.

Either way, I would say the main downloaders of the beta were people that follow up on mac happenings regularly, people like me that have mac os x at home and wanted to try Safari on my work computer (and want to see Apple succeed, etc.).

I don't think it really "hurt" anything. Everybody knows that anything new is going to have problems. The real test is HOW LONG do we wait for the fix?

Using Safari on my work PC now, and I really like it. It almost feels like being at home.

 

[Squozen]

That's so nice of you.. I wanted to say the same thing, so I don't even have to type it myself. Only thing different, I wanted to say it about the Mac ;-)

EDIT: I love my Mac, but I don't really understand how a Mac user who's a little bit of honesty left can call Windows more proprietary than Mac OS X.. the latter is even bound to the hardware. Needless to say there's no (easy) way to transfer all that songs bought from iTunes to Windows Media player.. while there's Microsoft Office for the Mac, I haven't seen an implementation of iWork so far.. is there a way to run my Keynote presentations on Windows if my Powerbook battery is empty and I forgot my charger, and everybody in the audience just has a Windows laptop?

Let's leave DRM music out of it, as all DRM sucks and will be dead in a few years as customers embrace alternatives.

I was specifically referring to TiAdiMundo's examples:

Newest Mail client - what format is this in? Can the mail be exported to other apps easily? OS X Mail stores its email in plaintext files that can be converted relatively easily or read in Notepad on Windows if necessary.

IE7 - proprietary ActiveX controls that won't work on any other platform. Completely broken. Versus Safari which takes pride in following web standards.

Windows Media Player 11 - creates proprietary Windows-only files that cannot be read by OS X or Linux. Versus iTunes which creates a standard AAC file playable on all OSs and many standalone devices.

All the iWork applications save their data files as plaintext XML, so there is nothing technically stopping you from creating an application to convert them to another platform. All the Microsoft office applications have encrypted formats that aren't even readable by the previous version of Office.

 

[flopticalcube]

haha, Im a typical pc user? whatever

70% of firefox's downloads end up in trash can, consider the pre-alpha quality of safari for win, 85% is a very kind number already.

Yes. I think you are underestimating that. More like >90%

 

[Kenn Marks]

My thoughts exactly. How many of those 1 million downloads are actually from Mac users that want to try out Safari on Windows? Either on Boot Camp, Parallels/VMWare, or their Windows Machines. I guess quite a lot.

If Apple is honest they filtered the Web logs and only reflected actual Dell's, HP's, etc. just as was reported back on May 25 here on MacRumors that an iPhone was spotted on their web site. How did they know that - Web Log

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A538a Safari/419.3

 

[SheriffParker]

3. >85% safari windows download end up in trash can

Don't you mean recycle bin?

 

[clevin]

If Apple is honest they filtered the Web logs and only reflected actual Dell's, HP's, etc. just as was reported back on May 25 here on MacRumors that an iPhone was spotted on their web site. How did they know that - Web Log

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A538a Safari/419.3

frankly, I don't think including OSX users is wrong, a download is a download. They just hide part of the information, every politician is doing it.

 

[CoreWeb]

If Apple is honest they filtered the Web logs and only reflected actual Dell's, HP's, etc. just as was reported back on May 25 here on MacRumors that an iPhone was spotted on their web site. How did they know that - Web Log

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A538a Safari/419.3

No, I'm pretty sure that IE will not put in anything in the User Agent String identifying it as a Mac computer even when running in Bootcamp or Parallels. (The CPU, after all, is still Intel, and I don't think Windows, or especially IE, will have any idea it is running on a Mac, Dell, etc. Therefore, it would be impossible for IE to inform Apple's servers that the computer was indeed a Dell, HP, or any other machine.)

And, Apple will not have filtered anything. They want the number to appear as large as possible.

 

[theBB]

But you cant enter a blank address for the homepage (which really speeds things up for me on the Mac side).

I set an empty file on my harddisk as my homepage to get that blank home page option.

I have not tried Safari 3 yet, but almost all of the features were already part of Firefox. However, I like the simple interface of Safari, so I might use at work once the non-beta version gets released. I guess I could look into some Firefox themes, but I am a bit lazy.

BTW, I have a few question for those who has already played with it:

1) Does Safari 3 have an "open new tab" button?

2) Is it possible to set it so that the results of the little Google Search box gets opened in a new tab instead of in the current tab?

 

[j33pd0g]

I understand - and agree - but still have to laugh at:

while also raising usage of its Safari web browser, which would theoretically require more website developers to ensure that their sites work properly with Safari.

Why?

Because as a web developer I have to make sure sites are working... but in IE. In fact, (for me) I'm finding that there are more then a dozen ways to build sites (mostly CSS, PHP, and soft-core AJAX) that work (cross compatibility) in Safari, Opera, Firefox, and Netscape, but only one hacked up crazy way to do it in IE.

I hope Safari gets out of BETA soon so maybe my work will get a little easier. Maybe MS will be shamed into actually fixing their BS browser.

 

[66217]

1) Does Safari 3 have an "open new tab" button?

2) Is it possible to set it so that the results of the little Google Search box gets opened in a new tab instead of in the current tab?

1- Cmd+T opens a new tab. But there isn't a button to make this.

2- Type what you want, and when you click "Search" click it pressing Cmd. (Or press Cmd+return)

 

[rockosmodurnlif]

Don't you mean recycle bin?

+1 Windows for being more eco-friendly.

Apple should trump them and rename the Trash Can to Renewable Space.

 

[CANEHDN]

Even that patch from Apple is not a bad thing as it shows Windows is FULL of holes and the OSX version didnt need patching.

That is one the dumbest things I have ever heard. Safari has been out for some time now on the Mac. Porting it over to Windows is of course going to have problems. The holes recently patched were Apple's problem not Microsoft's. I'm now using Safari on Windows and am a huge Mac fan but don't give credit to Apple when credit is most certainly not due.

 

[66217]

That is one the dumbest things I have ever heard. Safari has been out for some time now on the Mac. Porting it over to Windows is of course going to have problems. The holes recently patched were Apple's problem not Microsoft's. I'm now using Safari on Windows and am a huge Mac fan but don't give credit to Apple when credit is most certainly not due.

But writing it for a completely different OS is not that easy. They do have a credit by doing it.

 

[Flowbee]

With regard to blurry text... Apple computers (and apps) render text differently than Windows PCs. When I switched to Mac a few years ago, I noticed the "blurry" text, too. My Mac-using friends didn't know what I was talking about. After a few weeks on my new computer, my eyes (brain) adjusted and I didn't notice the "blurriness" anymore; text just looked nice and smooth. Now when I'm on a Windows machine using IE or Firefox, the text looks jagged and terrible to me.

I don't have a windows pc here to check, but does the text in iTunes for Windows look like text in Safari for Windows? Or is Safari "blurrier"?

 

[flyinmac]

I have to disagree.

I'm willing to bet that Safari 3 will be available for both Tiger & Leopard (as well as Windows XP and Windows Vista).

I do hope you're right. But, it would be a departure from their recent history to do so.

They have treated their updated browsers as a main feature of the new OS at the time they ship.

But, yes, hopefully they will not continue shipping Safari as a "Bundled Only" application.