Okay, we know that Safari Sucks, but what if you need to test your website on IE & would like to avoid it at all costs as well? Try the Firefox Add-on IE Tab (not available for MacOSX). It will embed an Internet Explorer window in tabs of Firefox.
As reported by Macworld, a recent interview with Michael Barrett, PayPal’s chief information security officer, reveals that “Apple, unfortunately, is lagging behind what they need to do, to protect their customers”. Barrett also said, “Our recommendation at this point, to our customers, is use Internet Explorer 7 or 8 when it comes out, or Firefox 2 or Firefox 3, or indeed Opera”. Barrett went on to explain:
“Unlike its competitors, Safari has no built-in phishing filter to warn users when they are visiting suspicious Web sites, Barrett said. Another problem is Safari’s lack of support for another anti-phishing technology, called Extended Validation (EV) certificates. This is a secure Web browsing technology that turns the address bar green when the browser is visiting a legitimate Web site.”
Apple representatives weren’t immediately available to comment on this story.
Internet Explorer 8 is now available and has some nice new features to offer like FaceBook integration, as well as some already offered by FireFox, such as Automatic Crash Recovery.
Why is the type so blurry on Safari? Believe it or not, this is intentional.
Both Microsoft and Apple use a technology called sub-pixel rendering. This technology basically splits pixels into three parts (RGB), and allows for three times the resolution flexibility. Microsoft and Apple have two different philosophies when it comes to how to utilize this technology.
Joel Spolsky explains:
* Apple generally believes that the goal of the algorithm should be to preserve the design of the typeface as much as possible, even at the cost of a little bit of blurriness.
* Microsoft generally believes that the shape of each letter should be hammered into pixel boundaries to prevent blur and improve readability, even at the cost of not being true to the typeface.
So, Apple is willing to over-anti-alias the type in Safari in an attempt to make it look prettier. Although the type rendered in Firefox and IE isn’t quite as “pretty”, it is much sharper and more legible. It is doubtful that Windows users will be willing to switch to the fuzzy text found in Safari any time soon.
“The world’s best browser. Now on Windows, too.”
On Monday, June 11, 2007, Steve Jobs announced that Apple had created a version of Safari of Windows.
Safari, which previously ran solely on the Apple Macintosh operating system, has approximately 4.9 percent of the browser business. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has around 78 percent, while Firefox has around 15 percent of the browser market.
