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.
* 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...
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).
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.