Apple should re-release Safari for Windows | Hacker News Reader

Apple should re-release Safari for Windows

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83 pointscacozen59 comments

Said by someone that I'm going to have to assume never used the Windows version of Safari when it was available. I was one of those hard-core Mac users forced to use Windows for work, and...meh, it was easier to quit struggling against the restraints and just use Firefox if I wanted an alternative browser. I mean, Safari on Windows was fine (best I can remember), but the only thing it really seemed to bring to the table was "it looks like the browser on my Mac". Faster JS? Who cares? Geeks, that's who. And Apple isn't about to spend gazillions to write a Windows browser for geeks (hell, look at how they treat devs for their own platforms).

So when I use a Windows machine (ten years or so later, still have to use one for work), I just fire up Firefox, just like I'd do even if there were a current version of Safari for Windows. I have no ideological dog in this fight, so I'll go the easiest route that doesn't involve Edge or Chrome.

EDIT: oops, there's an HN bug. I went to update the original comment, and it posts this duplicate (with my updates) instead. I'll delete the original/dupe here in a minute or two.

This person lives in a fantasy land. Safari may be on a brief hot streak right now but they have a long and deep history of dragging feet and literally slowing down the entire ecosystem.

I don't think slowing down the (Google-propelled) web standards commitees is the worst thing in the world. The endless rolling release stifles browser competition. I wish we could treat the web as a protocol and say "here, this is all it does and all it will do for the next N years, make the most of it".

In general this would be a good thing, but not the way Safari does it. Why? Well, because eventually, almost everything Safari doesn't implement does get implemented in Safari, and because some of their longer running omissions smell suspiciously like conflicts of interest that hurt the ecosystem. A lot of people are incorrectly under the impression that Safari finally supports WebM and Opus, but it only does so on macOS (and every time I point this out, someone under that impression claims it has changed recently, and it never has; it's like Apple wants you to think it's supported.) Not to mention their "great" influence on the WebGPU standard and any other number of weird omissions and quirks in Safari.

It's annoying that I need Apple hardware to make sure my web applications work in Safari when I basically never need to specifically test Chrome or Firefox.

Probably not a good idea for the same reason we do not make phones a protocol and say this is all phones will do for N years, make the most of it?

YMMV. If you hate Google and love Apple - it sounds like a good idea to kill innovation at Google's expense.

There's nothing stopping the web from being frozen. Safari could do it if it wanted to. All that would happen is that Safari would lose market share.

Funny enough, that might be exactly why web devs want Safari on Windows, optimally with the whole Apple media stack like iTunes is already shipping: to know what their website would do on a Mac without having one.

(Media stack? Yes, I am salty about Opus Ogg support.)

Apple still builds WebKit for Windows, and you can run it today! https://james.darpinian.com/blog/safari-on-windows

Of course, it's not Safari. But it could be useful for testing CSS quirks or similar without requiring a Mac. And if Apple wanted to ship Safari for Windows... well it would still be a tremendous amount of work. And I don't see what Apple would get out of it. But at least porting WebKit is already half done.

It is basically what is offerted in MS Playwright, right?

Yeah, "should", as in "Apple should invest millions of dollars in a product that (almost) nobody uses or cares about". Tweeting is easy, isn't it?

Do you have proof nobody uses it? Quick Google search shows that it has slightly under 20% market share: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

Part of that is going to be iOS where Apple simply bans anything not using the OS provided webkit. Filter to desktop share and the number drops to 13% https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...

Which is still a decent chunk, but if it didn't have the same preinstalled advantage or OS/hardware optimizations it enjoys on MacOS it's hard to imagine that number would change much.

> if it didn't have the same preinstalled advantage

One could say the same about edge. And google’s practice of shoving “install chrome” notifications and pop ups down your throat at every opportunity when on a google website or app

It was in reference to the Windows version specifically, it was definitely not 20% marketshare on Windows

I assume parent commenter was referring to Safari for Windows

Why wait for Apple to do it? WebKit is Open Source and cross-platform, all of the tools to make a stripped-back, privacy respecting browser are right in front of you. Linux even has a couple WebKit-based browsers to prove that it's possible, although none of them are really that popular relative to Chrome or Firefox. All things considered, it's not surprising that Apple (or anyone really) hasn't done this.

Another proof point:

https://browser.kagi.com/

Though not Windows, it shows marrying up Chrome/Firefox extensions on WebKit engine, with iCloud sync.

Interesting. I assumed it was just another Chromium clone. This might be the closest thing we also have when it comes to testing Safari compat on Windows.

except there is no word on supporting windows or linux. it would be a nice alternative, especially once it becomes FOSS as they plan to. maybe when that happens someone will port it.

oh wait, there is: https://orionfeedback.org/d/2321-orion-for-windows-android-l...

No regular user is going to care that there is yet another Webkit derivative browser if it's not backed by a big name like Apple.

Many regular users wouldn't care regardless. To the contrary, some might ask why we need another big proprietary browser option at all. If the answer is merely "to appease Apple users on other platforms", the outcome will probably be similar to the last time Safari went cross-plat.

True. Even as a Mac user I wouldn't want to use Safari on Windows again. It just feels like a second-class citizen.

One of the reasons I appreciate Safari on OS X is that it's one of the fastest and lowest power usage browsers due to Apple being intimately familiar with their internal APIs and hardware. I never got the same feeling of polish for any software Apple makes to run on Windows. I feel like a lot of what makes Safari worthwhile on OS X simply won't exist on a Windows version.

Reminds me of iTunes for Windows. That was a trashy app if I've ever seen one... makes Spotify on desktop (which I think is an electron web app?) feel like a dream in comparison.

I'm happy to believe that iTunes on NT is terrible, but the missing datapoint is whether iTunes on Darwin is also terrible. That is - is it a badly supported platform, or is iTunes just awful?

From my time with a mac, iTunes was bad on a mac. But at least it follows the platform UI (as much as any media player does). iTunes on windows insists on trying to look and feel like the mac version, which is very out of place on Windows. Safari for Windows did the same thing when it was around. Pulling in Apple's fonts and Apple's font rendering is part of the problem.

It was far less glitchy than iTunes for Windows, but no longer exists on macOS. years ago Apple split it into TV app, Music app, and they do device sync is through the file system Finder app.

Generally the replacements still lack many iTunes features many years later, but iTunes really did grow into an unmanageable monster.

I've run it on both. And it's kinda shit on both. But it's really, really shitty on Windows.

Close, it's an app that uses Chromium Embedded Framework or "CEF."

Let's be clear though, iTunes on mac is no peach.

Then you'll be glad to hear Apple Music is back on Windows, and almost as terrible!

Please no. Safari is the browser that gives our company the most pain by far in terms of development and user experience.

And when I’ve personally tried using it on my various Macs over the years, I’ve always encountered bugs and glitches on websites that are seemingly not there with other browsers.

To be honest I’m pretty unhappy with a few of Apple’s “core” apps. Music is another dumpster fire...

I think this is an argument for why Windows should get it. There's clearly a lack of Webkit compatibility attention here? Isn't this the whole problem with Chromium domination? Websites become designed for Chromium rather than the web. Of course, HTML5 and WHATWG helped a whole lot but there are still browser idiosyncrasies as usual.

What are web developers that don't have any Apple devices supposed to do?

Does the most profitable company in the world really need to gate-keep its browser like it does for developing on its phones?

That would be nice, Apple and Mozilla seems to be the only companies caring about efficiency..

https://medium.com/homullus/8-browsers-in-a-tiny-car-energy-...

Yes, please! More Webkit on Windows and in particular Safari of course for testing. But also for the sake of renderer competition. I don't think it'd hurt Apple other than maintenance overhead. Safari of all things never gave Apple the slightest of a competitive edge! iMessages and stuff did.

I'm also a weirdo in that I actually fancy macOS smoother "typeface-first" font hinting (or rather lack thereof) even if they become a bit "blurrier".

If we’re signing Apple up for big projects without any discernible benefit, why not shoot for the moon? Apple should release iOS for x86. Makes about as much sense.

I’m working full time in safari nowadays and very recently google decided that logins for accounts with yubikeys as required 2fa no longer can sign in without errors. I love safari but it’s frustrating that it’s still second class for even major companies like google to test their changes on.

Google being anti-competitive isn't Safari's fault.

I use my YubiKey with Safari for Google without errors.

Edit: Not saying it's working right for everyone, only that it's not universally broken. That is, it's capable of working, even if it's not OK on your system.

I agree that google apps are especially bad on safari. Meets is frequently very laggy and sheets can take a long time to load with the UI frozen.

Same. Also, even without the ChromeTM ExclusiveTM Enchancements, I could swear my camera looks better in Chrome than Safari, when if anything it should be other way around.

Not quite sure I see Apple being willing to spend resources to make Windows less of an unpleasant cesspool, and even losing business if a few people, thanks to Safari, find it tolerable and don't switch to Apple.

Apple sure wouldn’t mind gaining more Windows converts. But it hasn’t been their core strategy for a long time. They do care about Safari being supported by websites—and thus by developers of those websites—so the browsing experience on iOS doesn’t suck.

Apple will produce another Windows version of Safari if, and probably only if, they come to believe it’s an important and necessary developer target. For now, they probably rightly believe otherwise… whether that’s because developers are using and/or testing in Safari on Apple devices already, or because their efforts targeting Blink are sufficiently compatible.

Its like people are just trying to trigger me today. Windows has IE and edge, safari is just a slower more buggy version of that. I don't care if the js engine is 50% faster if its dom implementation doesn't follow any standard and the rendering engine is 200% slower.

If people cared about any of the above they would use edge not chrome and firefox, people care about stability and compaitibility.

Urgh no thanks.

We only just saw the end of IE6, don’t bring it back.

Safari is deliberately stunted, behind and incompatible.

Simple, top of the head example, where is AV1 video playback?

I thought the tweet author responded to this exact point?

> I hear you saying: Safari is the modern ie6, but this is changing: For some reason Apple is investing on Safari again, they hired a bunch of people and things that were glaringly missing are now being shipped.

If you're not logged into twitter/X you can't read replies or any other context, so thanks for posting that but try to phrase it in a more helpful way instead of assuming we can all see that.

Thanks for pointing that out. I didn't even realize tweets had replies... the new UI is so confusing I wish we could ban tweets as sources

I had no idea, thanks!

It shows this: (why no reply count??)

> 4 Reposts / 2 Quotes / 16 Likes / 2 Bookmarks

I didn't know either.

I wonder if the reason it doesn't show a reply count is because the reply was from the same author as the first tweet so it's really a thread, not a reply. I'm not sure though, maybe Twitter never shows a reply count.

> I hear you saying: Safari is the modern ie6

Chrome is the modern ie6 period.

Very few users would want AV1 without hardware support, and Apple platforms do not have that.

You are saying this as if Apple could not add AV1 hardware decoding to their chips.

Intel, AMD and NVIDIA have figured it out 3 years ago, so can Apple.

They will have it in the A17 (announced today) and presumably iOS 17. Until then, there is no point in having it in Safari.

I don’t even use safari on Mac, why would I use it on windows?

ITunes for Windows - clearly Apple don't care about Windows.

In all fairness iTunes is terrible on Mac as well.

If iTunes = Apple Music, then I wish more people talked about this. The UX is so-so on iPhones, and terrible on Mac, and probably irredeemable on Windows. Insane that such a cornerstone of Apple's services offerring is so bad.

For frontend developers, debugging in Safari can be quite challenging.

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