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Comment by jakobegger | Hacker News Reader

I'm almost certain that's the reason why Apple ported Safari to Windows. I doubt that they were actually trying to take market share from IE or Firefox, I think they just wanted to give Windows-based web developers an easy way to test their websites in WebKit. Now that Webkit is all but ubiquitous, Safari on Windows is no longer necessary.

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Apple released Safari for Windows less than three weeks before the iPhone went on sale. As you may recall, the first iPhone didn't allow third party native apps and instead used web apps with shortcuts on the home screen. Safari for Windows was most probably mainly meant as a Webkit based browser for developers.

I don't think it was about web apps at all. Web apps where just an interim thing while they were working on getting the SDK ready. I think the reason for Safari on Windows was to make sure that normal websites work on the iPhone.

Safari still uses WebKit, but Chrome has been using a WebKit fork called Blink since version 28.

The person you are responding to doesn't say anything about Chrome. WebKit can be built on Windows and Linux and there are browsers that use WebKit that support Windows and Linux.

It might be relevant to the assertion that WebKit is ubiquitous though, since the most popular browser using WebKit on Windows is Chrome, if say Safari on Windows gets less support because "there are other WebKit browsers," that it's not even the same WebKit in Chrome, but actually a fork.

It's possible the person didn't say anything about Chrome, or since all of the direct responses reference Chrome, it's also possible the parent comment was edited.

Yeah, I know. "Ubiquitous" is a bit exaggerated. But now there's enough WebKit users out there that developers can't afford to ignore them; especially on mobile, so the strategic importance of Safari for Windows is diminished.

Chrome differs substantially from Safari in rendering though.

This is the same mistake everyοne makes.

Just because a browser uses Webkit doesn't mean it uses the same version.

I already had to track down CSS rendering issues across Webkit implementations.

Also the JavaScript engine is not the same. Once we had sequence of Ajax calls failing in Safari, but working properly in Chrome.

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