Apple released a pretty big update to the Safari 3 Beta browser for Windows this morning. One of the most notable additions is the spelling and grammar checking, which can be done inline if you so desire. To have Safari check the spelling while you type just right-click in a text box, go to Spelling and Grammar, and then tick the Check Spelling While Typing option. As you can see above it underlines incorrect words with a dashed red line.
One of the other big features is the ability to perform a full history search. If you pull up the browser’s history and start to do a search it will scan all of the text for your visited websites, instead of just the titles and URL’s. This is almost like what Opera 9.5 offers, except that Safari’s isn’t searchable directly from the address bar.
There were also improvements to security, stability, compatibility, keyboard shortcuts, and several more features:
- Windows to be resized from any side – thank goodness! It was annoying have to grab the bottom-right corner each time I wanted to resize Safari.
- Includes an additional font smoothing option (”standard”)
- Supports listing FTP directories
- Links to proxy settings from Safari (Safari respects the proxy settings in the Windows Internet control panel)
- Adds cookie management
- Includes tooltips
- Allows printing of page numbers, titles, margins
- Improves bookmark collection interface
- Maintains original order of imported bookmarks
- Adds an interface for editing AutoFill information
- Adds a new preference to manually mark RSS articles as read
- Includes support for tilt wheels
If I didn’t know better I would almost say that Apple is trying hard to provide a decent version of Safari for Windows users. Who would have ever thought it would come to this?
Yeap. There is better.
Too late, Apple, as usual on windows platforms.
Big effort though, it seems.
They’ve definitely put more into making this behave like a Windows app, but there’s still one problem: the interface. The brushed metal looks nice in OS X, but horrendous in Windows. Mac fans get bent out of shape when other apps “don’t look like Mac” (Firefox being a prime example), yet Safari 3 on Windows doesn’t look like Windows. Apple should just bow to the inevitable and make it look more like a nice Windows app; at least provide the option, anyway.
Totally agree. safari 3 is an eyesore on windows. I am not a huge fan of mac apps, but quicktime and itunes look kinda okay, while safari is totally out of place.
Do we really need Safari on Windows? Well I’ve downloaded the update as I use it just to make sure the website I make are Safari compatible. I find the new ‘Spelling and Grammar’ feature pretty fine for I’m not an English speaking guy. However I agree that Safari is totally out of place on Windows machines. I prefer Firefox and Opera. Those are very good browsers!
I don’t think they will be changing that anytime soon, and it’s only bound to get worse as Apple brings more of their apps over to Windows. Now we have iTunes and Safari on Windows both of which seem out of place. The least they could do is make it skinnable.
I thought the addition of grammar checking was especially nice since they are the first browser that I know of which checks that.
It’s interesting that Microsoft has been king of spell-check/grammar check yet they haven’t incorporated that into their browser, yet Apple has. Go figure.
Safari is required, the iPhone, Dreamweaver, Android OS, etc all run on webkit. A browser that utilises webkit is desirable.
Besides that, they tuned the text rendering, and together with Acrobat Reader it produces the best rendering on the windows system.