Apple Safari 3 Public Beta has just been released and is now available for PC on Windows XP and Windows Vista. It’s a bit to early to tell, but supposedly there are differences between the Mac and PC versions, however this doesn’t mean it isn’t good news for web developers who are cross browser testing. Many web developers run into browser situations frequently, especially with older browsers, and have to do what is called cross browser compatibility testing. Cross browser compatibility is key when developing websites to ensure visitors are seeing what the creators intended. Up until now PC users had to actually either have a Mac on hand, or in my case, have screenshots sent via the internet just to see what visual differences for instance the CSS have created. Developers often have had to use quirks, or hacks to hide or show styles and javascript to each browser, but this was also compounded by Safari being Mac exclusive.

Among the array of Safari features Snapback, Resizable Text Fields, and Inline Find are really nice touches. Snapback will snap a browser back to the top level of a website, or the search results. Resizable Text Feilds are just that, click and drag a text field to resize it. Inline Find is the syntax highlighting of the search term, it’s been done many times before, but usually hard coded within the site being searched.

It’s nice to have another browser to choose from, and with Safari also being the main browser for the Apple iPhone, it’s a great decision to have it released on the PC. There are interesting speed results displayed on the Apple Safari website indicating the differences between browsers, but in all honesty, I personally recommend downloading it for testing (public beta), and of course for Mac users to have the latest version of Safari.

Safari 3 Public Beta Download

This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 10:02 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.