Safari on XP on Parallels on MacOS on MacBook

[binky]

Wow. This virtual machine thing is creeping me out.

Apple released their Safari browser for Windows today. Ignoring the issue of the wisdom of that, they did it and there ya have it.

I am too lazy to pull out my Dell to try it so I turn on the new Parallels on my MacBook Pro. It boots up XP but does it in a new "coherent" mode which doesn't show the desktop/background thing so it looks kinda like Wine would have looked if I could ever have gotten it to work well enough.

I downloaded the Safari .exe file using Safari for Mac OS and it put it on my desktop. For kicks I double-clicked on the .exe file and to my amazement the installer opens up and starts to load into the virtual C: drive within Parallels. Whoa. That's wierd that I can do that -- start a real .exe file that's on my Mac drive partition and from within the MacOS.

To make a long story short I'm now browsing CPF using Safari for Windows in XP in the Parallels virtual machine environment on the MacBook Pro and it's just totally creeping me out. It even has the aqua scrollbar and other aqua clues to the window but it's kinda sorta under XP. Realy wierd without that XP desktop to orient me about which OS it's actually running in. This must be the direction things are going but it's creepy.

 

[knot]

"The world's best browser"
Perhaps, as far as apple browsers go. There are no extensions or themes so it's not the "best" IMO. I installed it and it wants to speak "apple" to me, you know - gibberish. In the search field I typed "candle"

 

[binky]

Yikes -- definitely some real font problem going on there. Sorry it didn't work for you. Since my last post I learned that Apple supposedly released it to allow Win developers to develop apps for the iPhone, which will only allow public apps as AJAX applets within Safari to maintain a semblance of a sandbox environment. I haven't found Safari to be very stable on the MacOS, so I'm a little pessimistic that the idea will keep the phone from crashing. I'm hoping the iPhone keeps the "force quit".

Regardless, methinks it's a strange new world when Safari runs on Win on a Mac box. And there's something very "Yertle the Turtle" about it.

As to Apple browsers, nope it doesn't have themes. Neither does it have work modes that you can save & return to (with all your open tabs & logins saved) or stacked browsing history. There's a lot it doesn't have yet.

 

[chesterqw]

downloaded it, used it.

i still prefer firefox for the abundance of plugins and themes... and the customization...

 

[carrot]

Safari offers some customization and extensions... but not nearly the library that Firefox has to offer. On the Mac, I choose Camino. But Safari excels in being lightweight and zippy, in my experience. I might have to boot up VirtualPC to check out the new Safari/Win32...

Wouldn't this make a first? The first KHTML/WebCore browser to hit Windows? This'll be a great boon to web developers.

 

[tinyblob]

Despite the obvious attractions of Firefox (my browser of choice on the occasion that i have to use Windows), i've always stuck with Safari because of the speed. Starting up Firefox on my old iBook was unbearably slow. It was still noticeably slower on my Macbook Pro.

The things i missed from Firefox were the warnings when you attempted to close with multiple tabs open (lost count of the number of times i've hit Command-Q instead of Command-W and lost a bunch of unread tabs), and the ability to restore a previous session (for the same reason).

But the new Safari beta has those features, woo!

 

[BB]

The things i missed from Firefox were the warnings when you attempted to close with multiple tabs open (lost count of the number of times i've hit Command-Q instead of Command-W and lost a bunch of unread tabs), and the ability to restore a previous session (for the same reason).

Tabbrowser Preferences (about TBP web page) add-on has a setting to give a warn on closing multiple tabs...

Tabbrowser Preferences Official FF Download page

Once you load TBP (and restart FireFox), to to the Tools/Options.../Tabbed Browsing/features screen and turn on "close on multiple tabs warning" check box.

-Bill

 

[LukeA]

Safari offers some customization and extensions... but not nearly the library that Firefox has to offer. On the Mac, I choose Camino. But Safari excels in being lightweight and zippy, in my experience. I might have to boot up VirtualPC to check out the new Safari/Win32...

Wouldn't this make a first? The first KHTML/WebCore browser to hit Windows? This'll be a great boon to web developers.

Hey, a fellow Camino user!

 

[jch79]

Hey, a fellow Camino user!

That makes three!

 

[matrixshaman]

Downloaded it for PC. It is the first program I have ever tried installing that won't install with my current installer. So I upgrade - not trusting MS a lot but just to check this out. Then I install Safari. It looks like it is going to start but WAIT. It seems frozen. Kill task and try again. This time it's just sort of frozen but this gets better. You can't type anything into the address field. And all the pull down menus pull down but are blank. And it still seems mostly frozen so I pop open task manager and the memory usage for it is 68 Megabytes and climbing rapidly. And CPU useage is running between 89 and 99 percent. And Memory keeps climbing. By the time I killed it the memory useage was up to 260 Megabytes (in less than one minute). Congrats Apple you have won my award for a program consuming the most memory of any I have ever used. And it still wasn't working.
Ok for the other info that may have affected this test - I don't trust MS and XP a lot so I've got it locked down to the max. It works great this way for 99.99% of what I try running and I don't get problems from virii or hacker stuff. And I'll say this is a Beta of Safari. ??? But the first day out Safari was found by hackers to have 6 security exploits with 2 DOS exploits and they were already implementing one. UNINSTALL. DELETE. Back to Opera. I really wanted to compare it to MY Opera based on their charts showing it was faster. Faster in 2 respects by 1/10 of a second and another by several but Opera seemed to fair best in THEIR charts against Safari. I'll bet mine would have been different. Nothing beats Opera for speed. And certainly not this lame version of Safari. And I thought that was quite bold of Apple to offer to install a program that will make your printers and other network device sharing much easier with their proggy. ??? They are now trying to take over Windows OS functions? Be afread - be very afraid. Think Trojan horse but not so much in the virus sense.

 

[Empath]

Think trojan is right. So far, nothing Apple has produced (I only know of three) for Windows has been offered in a manner that appears to be in good faith.

I learned a few years ago that Quicktime and Windows are not compatible. Other than the security holes that required patching, it also altered associations and settings everytime it was used, even after resetting them between use. By every sense of the word, that's called malware. I eventually removed it completely from my system, and will do without the quicktime movies.

Then came iTunes; it tries to put Quicktime back. That makes it malware. Now, preliminary information regarding Safari indicates heavy reliance on Quicktime. Without even considering the security flaws uncovered, it's off to a rocky start.

I watched with interest the introduction of iTunes for Windows, and noticed the excitement within the Apple crowd. It seems the same here. The excitement over a Windows version of Safari seems to be on the part of Apple users. Go figure.

Safari, even without their problems would lack the transparency of Internet Explorer's integration with the system, and lacks the flexibility in configuring and modifying Firefox. Other than trying to claim being "secure", I don't know their reason for jumping into the browser wars.

But it does excite Mac users.

 

[binky]

... So far, nothing Apple has produced (I only know of three) for Windows has been offered in a manner that appears to be in good faith.
...
But it does excite Mac users.

Wow. Empath in non-mod mode.

All I was trying to say is that it's creepy. If you know the story, Yertle doesn't exactly have the most noble demeanor or intentions.

Your post doesn't have your usual measured temperament and look-beyond perspective, so obviously Apple really super ticked you off. I'm sorry to read that their software gave you such a terrible experience!

I just ran the iTunes 7.2 installer .exe. It still installs QuickTime without offering a checkbox not to install it or at least an obvious notification that QT install is along for the ride. So if QT is messing your workflow (or playflow) then you'll still want to steer clear of it.

 

[matrixshaman]

It's the same as the old Ford vs. Chevy thing. Both sides like to at each other - hopefully it's kept light. When I posted I was a bit ticked off at some of the things Apple is doing with this program. I'd go so far as to say some of it is a bit unethical. And then it became laughable watching it eat all my memory - not sure just how far it would have gone but there didn't appear to be any end in sight so I'm sure at some point it would have completely crashed my system. Whether that is incompetent programming or something intentional it is just wrong - Apple

 

[pcmike]

Wow... can we say paranoid? :thinking:

Downloaded it for PC. It is the first program I have ever tried installing that won't install with my current installer. So I upgrade - not trusting MS a lot but just to check this out. Then I install Safari. It looks like it is going to start but WAIT. It seems frozen. Kill task and try again. This time it's just sort of frozen but this gets better. You can't type anything into the address field. And all the pull down menus pull down but are blank. And it still seems mostly frozen so I pop open task manager and the memory usage for it is 68 Megabytes and climbing rapidly. And CPU useage is running between 89 and 99 percent. And Memory keeps climbing. By the time I killed it the memory useage was up to 260 Megabytes (in less than one minute). Congrats Apple you have won my award for a program consuming the most memory of any I have ever used. And it still wasn't working.
Ok for the other info that may have affected this test - I don't trust MS and XP a lot so I've got it locked down to the max. It works great this way for 99.99% of what I try running and I don't get problems from virii or hacker stuff. And I'll say this is a Beta of Safari. ??? But the first day out Safari was found by hackers to have 6 security exploits with 2 DOS exploits and they were already implementing one. UNINSTALL. DELETE. Back to Opera. I really wanted to compare it to MY Opera based on their charts showing it was faster. Faster in 2 respects by 1/10 of a second and another by several but Opera seemed to fair best in THEIR charts against Safari. I'll bet mine would have been different. Nothing beats Opera for speed. And certainly not this lame version of Safari. And I thought that was quite bold of Apple to offer to install a program that will make your printers and other network device sharing much easier with their proggy. ??? They are now trying to take over Windows OS functions? Be afread - be very afraid. Think Trojan horse but not so much in the virus sense.

 

[gadget_lover]

Think trojan is right. So far, nothing Apple has produced (I only know of three) for Windows has been offered in a manner that appears to be in good faith.

I don't think Apple is any worse than any other company. IBM release a crippled version of Unix that sucked. MS releases "patches" that are actually Copyright enforcement (DRM) tools, and will not let you download the real security patches if you don't "agree" to the DRM.

As for throwing around terms like trojan and malware.... Well, I reserve those terms for software with malevolent intent. Not just bad design or annoying behavior.


Daniel