I was pleased to see that Apple have released a version of Safari for Windows. It’s in beta stage at the moment, but I quickly went to the Apple site to download it.
The main reason I want to have access to it is to test how websites we’re working on look in Safari, thus ensuring that we have tested our sites across all major browsers. Up until now the only option we’ve had comes in the form of services offering rendered screen-shots of the website in question. There will still be differences between the Windows version of Safari and the Mac version, mainly focussed on the differing system fonts available, but it should at least confirm that sites are working solidly.
So I happily installed and ran Safari and was greeted by a surprise. Gobbledegook! It’s hard to explain, but click on the screen shot to see how strange it is. Every bit of typography on the page has been turned into unrecognisable characters. Menus, the address bar, text on the page. Obviously it doesn’t affect text that is fixed into an image, but everything else is up for grabs.
Even typing an address into the address bar doesn’t work. http://? No no, we don’t need that, let’s go for jvvr<11
I’m going to un-install, download the updated 3.0.0.1 version and try installing again.
Update - June 15th, 2007
I’ve just done some playing around. The newer version doesn’t change a thing. I had heard some grumblings about problems with language versions and so I changed my system language to English (US) instead of English (Ireland), but no change there.
Interestingly the help file is displaying normally. So I’ve been trying to navigate around the options but it’s next to impossible.
I got my co-worker to install it on his machine and it looks different.. in his case there is no text at all.. menus aren’t displaying, although you can click on them. Typing into the address bar displays nothing. It’s all a bit strange.
Update 2 - June 15th, 2007
Well, after a bit of searching about I have found a possible fix (well it worked for me).
Apparently if you are having this problem you need to go into your fonts folder, delete Lucida Grande and Lucida Grande Bold. Then you have to browse to Program Files/Safari/safari.resources and take the font files from there and install them into your fonts folder.
9:33 am
February 26th, 2008
Just downloaded Safari 3.04 but after installation it inmediately gave problems and had to shut down. Can´t even open the programm… Maybe it´s my PC?
1:17 pm
February 26th, 2008
Hi Rutger,
I had no problems in the past with running Safari, but I’ve just upgraded my PC so that gave me a good opportunity to download the latest version, 3.04, and install again and see what happened.
Seems you’re not alone, I installed (ensuring to not install the Bonjour Service or Apple Update – two bits of software I don’t need running in the background thank you very much), and on first run it loads up the browser and then instantly I get a Windows Error saying Safari has encountered a problem etc etc.
I’m not sure what the cause of this could be, it ran fine on my old machine, and I’m pretty sure I had upgraded to 3.04 when it came out. Unfortunately I can’t be much help other than to tell you it’s not just your PC anyway.
I’ve had a look through the Safari forums for windows.
The only suggestion I can find is that there may be a problem with the 3.04 version and you should try out installing 3.03 which you can get from our favourite on-line software resource, File Hippo!
http://filehippo.com/download_safari/
I hope that’s some help to you :)
Cheers,
Alex
11:18 am
April 13th, 2008
Looks like they’ve definitely sorted the issue out with Safari 3.1