Comment by AnonC | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AnonC | Hacker News Reader

I used to use Safari as an alternative browser along with Firefox on Windows. It seemed fast at that time. Then Apple stoped releasing Safari on Windows.

I still use Safari on macOS. It seems to retain great performance with great battery life.

Off topic:

What would be cool is if Apple released Safari for Windows (again) and Linux. Ok, probably not for Linux, since Apple doesn’t work well with the desired licensing schemes and since Apple isn’t capable of working with the diversity on Linux to release an end user application.

Safari on Windows and Linux may be probable (not even possible) only in an alternate universe, since Apple focuses on OS support for its applications in (roughly) this order: iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS/homeOS and miscellaneous (this includes Android and Windows). Anything outside iOS seems to get really smaller budgets, smaller teams and very little attention.

Additionally, there is no money in Safari on other platforms, unless Apple does come up with the oft rumored Apple search engine and expands its advertising ambitions even more (considering how poorly Siri has been improving over time, any such search engine would be better not being developed or released at all).

The odd thing is they've been maintaining a partial port of Safari for Windows this whole time - iTunes at least used to use it for its embedded webview.

But aside from that use for it, Safari for Windows would have 100% been a play to try and keep Google from taking over the web, and I guess that didn't matter to them.

I love Safari. It’s been my daily driver since it was released.

I also installed it immediately on Windows. It was great for testing issues and seeing how things would render, but it was not performant.

It seemed to do that same thing as iTunes and QT where it felt like Apple just ported their whole GUI stack on top of Windows. It looked and worked exactly like in a Mac. But that came with a big performance cost.

Even as a big fan I couldn’t stand to use it as my main browser on my windows machine at work. I only used it for testing things. Otherwise I stuck to FireFox.

I’ve always felt like Safari for windows was 100% about the HTML based “apps” before the App Store (so Windows users could develop them) and so companies could test their sites for iPhones without having to buy them when they were still niche/expensive.

As iPhones rocketed to popularity, they didn’t seem to see it as necessary. The popularity of the iPhone alone was enough to force testing. And the iPod touch was there too as a cheaper testing device.

I know it came out 4 years before the iPhone. Maybe it was laying the foundation? I just can’t see Apple truly wanting to be in the Windows browser market.

Yeah, they didn't really want to have a Windows browser, but they were pushing the web as a platform in order to undo the Windows lock on applications.

There are multiple ports of WebKit (the browser engine of Safari) on Windows [1], but two of them are still more or less maintained:

* AppleWin, Apple's port of WebKit for use in iTunes for Windows. I'm pretty sure it depends on DLLs that reimplements Cocoa APIs on Windows, those DLLs are shipped with iTunes. (edit: one can download the support libraries here [2])

* WinCairo, maintained by Sony and uses Cairo for rendering. Maybe someone can fill me in why is this a thing, since Sony only uses WebKit on the PlayStations.

[1]: https://fujii.github.io/2019/07/05/webkit-on-windows/

[2]: https://developer.apple.com/opensource/internet/webkit_sptli...

Maybe because Windows is so commonly used for game development. I wrote up instructions for downloading and running Windows builds directly from Apple, for anyone curious: https://james.darpinian.com/blog/safari-on-windows. It can be useful if you want to quickly test how your page layout might look in Safari but you don't have a Mac handy.

AppleWin only supports the WebKit1 API (the old, single process WebKit), and not anything more modern.

As for why Sony maintains WinCairo, I believe they use Cairo on their platforms, and they mostly use Windows for their dev systems (as does most of the games industry).

As I wrote to other reply, Epiphany (what GNOME calls "Internet", I... think?? I dislike GNOME names) is based on WebKit

https://webkit.org/downloads/

edit: oh it's "GNOME Web". OK

Whether there is money on other platforms depends more on how popular it'd become on those platforms not really whether Apple starts their own search engine. Safari right now gets ~15 billion/year to keep Google as the default search engine.

Which means that Google makes more than that from them otherwise it wouldn’t be a good business decision.

Not necessarily. It could also effectively be a bribe to keep Apple from developing their own search engine.

No one is debating that. But clearly Google thinks the bribe is a good business decision. Which means they make more money from the users than they pay in the bribe.

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