Anigozanthos

The latest buzz in the web development world is Apple releasing Safari for Windows. It's a beta of their next version 3 browser.

This basically nixes the vague thoughts I'd had about purchasing a Mac mini. Now I can test all major web browsers directly on my PC.

Apple also compare Safari to other browsers, using the iBench 5.0 benchmark (linked there as I had some trouble finding it). I'm thinking about running my own tests, but it requires Windows Server 2000. Even more annoying is that several third-party components require you sign up for spam before you can download them

What I might try to do is create a virtual machine for all this. I'm not interested in absolute timings, just relative times.

The bottom line is that having Safari available to Windows users (and particularly, Windows web developers), can only be a good thing for the web. That's four out of the five major rendering engines (Trident, Gecko, Presto, and now Webkit), leaving just one (KHTML). The good thing about KHTML is that Webkit is based on it anyway, it's much easier to run Konqueror (eg via a Linux Live CD) than running Safari ever was, and many more people use Safari than use Konqueror.

Edit: The debug menu is available too: Edit "C:\Documents and Settings\<your user name>\Application Data\Apple Computer\Safari\Preferences.plist" using Wordpad, and add:

<key>IncludeDebugMenu</key>
<true/>

Edit2: It seems many people are having problems with no text showing. Frequent crashes may also be related. A thread on the Apple support forums indicates it's to do with the number of fonts installed. Also mentioned are some other possible fixes.