Comments on: Safari For Windows

By: Brian Heys

Brian Heys — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 22:15:52 +0000

I posted about my experiences with Safari a couple of days ago, and I’m sorry to say I don’t like it. I’m an Apple fan, and don’t go for starting ‘religious’ wars, but I think it was a mistake to try to shoehorn Apple fonts and application styling into a windows release.

Also, I had some major performance issues with Safari on my XP laptop. I’d be interested to hear from anyone else who experienced these.

By: Joe Cheng [MSFT]

Joe Cheng [MSFT] — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 08:24:21 +0000

alastair, it might be helpful to know that there are two different 2D rendering technologies in Windows–GDI and GDI+. GDI+ has a cleaner, more modern API but is notoriously wacky in the way it spaces out text onscreen, especially with ClearType enabled. Most apps use GDI drawing most of the time but if you’ve just occasionally seen the “messiness” then it is probably GDI+. When it occurs, the distortion is NOT subtle to anyone who has any kind of background in desktop publishing or typography.

GDI text doesn’t suffer from these problems. And it looks especially good on Vista. Comparing XP to Tiger seemed like a matter of preference to me–sharper vs. softer–but Vista’s subpixel rendering, especially at smaller font sizes, is a genuine leap forward. It makes me feel like I’m using a higher-res monitor.

Under XP, I used to use a bitmap font for programming (ProFont) and often had ClearType turned off altogether, but with Vista I haven’t felt the need at all.

I think the really interesting question is IF Windows users hate the Mac-style text rendering, will Apple switch to Windows-style text, or even provide a preference? Seems very un-Steve to me.

By: alastair

alastair — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 00:43:08 +0000

I’m pretty certain that Apple’s rendering is better. Why? Because Microsoft’s adjustments to the characters mess up the delicate balance of spacing in the font and as a result I think text often looks messy on Windows.

I should qualify that by saying that I’ve always thought that, even before I came to the Mac, so this isn’t just fanboyism, it’s that I have a genuine dislike of the distortions that are introduced (not to mention the fact that it typically breaks WYSIWYG to some degree for Windows apps). Of course, on Windows the effect isn’t too bad for Microsoft’s own fonts, because they went to great lengths to ensure that they were well hinted, but it’s often pretty objectionable for third-party fonts.

Of course, I can imagine Windows users being a bit perplexed at the sudden difference in rendering. It’ll be interesting to see how many users are attracted to the Safari browser on that platform.

By: Scott Stevenson

Scott Stevenson — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 21:25:32 +0000

Assuming that a big part of the motivation for releasing Safari for Windows is to make it easy to test sites on, I personally think you’d want to keep the rendering as identical as possible across platforms. That includes font metrics.

From what remember, this is something Mac Office has had to deal with over the years when rendering type in Word documents.