Apple ported their browser, Safari, to Windows and released a public beta this week. Having heard great things about Safari from a web-standards perspective I got it and had a look. Aside from the standards compliance it was just a browser – nice, but nothing compelling about it. Then this afternoon a window popped up on my screen:
Less than one week and Safari has its first security patch (it was cracked within hours) – I thought to myself “It’s genuine Windows software.”
I really enjoyed seeing this on Slashdot Firefox Breaks 50,000,000 Barrier. It was also fun to go to Blazing a Trail to 50,000,000 and watch as the counter shows that another 44,000 plus downloads have taken place in the six hours since then. Let the good times roll.
Just for fun I ran Firefox (1.0.3) and IE 6 (XP SP2 etc.) through The Second Acid Test after hearing the Safari passed the test. I was slightly disappointed to find that Firefox had problems with: shrink-to-fit on floating elements, paint ordering, collapsing margins and some CSS Table elements.
I was pleasantly surprised by IE6 though.
It rendered the CSS 1 properly.
I just spent 5 hours working on some beautiful, valid CSS because it was not rendering correctly in IE 6. It worked perfectly in Firefox. After all that work I came up with ugly and almost valid CSS that functions in both browsers – because I have to. I’d rather just put: Get Firefox! on the site and tell IE users to trash IE 6.