Rated: 90% (6 votes)
Loading ...If Christopher Biggins made browsers, they’d probably look like Safari
Ben Hardwidge
When you think of a Safari, you’ll probably think of a gorgeous African landscape filled with giraffes and elephants, with a few lions lurking here and there. At the very least, you might imagine having your car savaged by chimps in a cold field in England, or perhaps the really awful 1980s kids’ TV show ‘On Safari’ with Christopher Biggins.
It’s unfortunately the latter comparison that bears the best resemblance to Apple’s Safari web browser. Much like a real safari, Apple’s Safari browser has a lot to live up to if it wants to compete with what’s out there already, but it comes across as a poor imitator.
I was willing to overcome my initial scepticism about the browser, so I decided to give Safari a go yesterday. The first impressions were good – it featured tabbed browsing, it loaded quickly and it didn’t grind to a halt when you had multiple tabs open either. Then I noticed that my TFT monitor looked as if it was running at 1,024 x 768 rather than its native resolution of 1,280 x 1,024. All the fonts on every website were smoothed to a point of looking stupidly blurry, which had the effect of making it look like I’d set up my monitor badly. You can, of course, adjust the font smoothing, but even the lowest setting looked rubbish and you can’t even switch it off.
Apparently, this isn’t a fault with Safari; it’s actually supposed to be a positive feature. There’s a good <A xhref=” http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000885.html”>blog</A> about this at Coding Horror. Basically, Apple wants the fonts to look like as close to the original typeface as possible, even if this means sacrificing readability. I can see why this would make sense with some applications. If I was using a DTP app, for example, then I’d want the fonts to look as close to the proper typeface as possible. I’d want to know what the document would look like when printed, and I wouldn’t particularly care about how easy it was to read on screen, particularly as I could zoom in if I wanted to make the text clearer.
Can you zoom in to make the text bigger on Safari? Nope. You can with Firefox, of course. You just hold down Ctrl and roll your scroll wheel back and forth, and the font size will change to suit your own preferences. This anal attitude to fonts in a web browser simply baffles me. It’s a web browser for goodness sake; you use it to read websites, not to analyse the finer points of typefaces.
This might seem like a minor niggle, but it actually has a big impact on your web browsing experience. I’m not against font smoothing per se. In fact, I think ClearType in Windows does an excellent job of smoothing out fonts on TFT monitors. However, ClearType looks very different from the bizarre blurring in Safari.
I’m not quite sure why Apple thought that releasing Safari for Windows was a good idea. The browser market is already crowded, and the vast majority of people still use Internet Explorer anyway. Firefox has a much more comprehensive feature set than Safari, and it doesn’t make every website look like it’s been smudged by an art student either. For now, I’m going to stick with Firefox.
Why did Apple release it? The VERY simplest of reasons. Third Party apps for the iPhone are to be developed within Safari. They are trying to make it so Windows users can develop for the iPhone too.
It has nothing to do with trying to win a browser war.