Once again, Safari makes the world look better.
So, if you’ve been reading this blog much, you’ve undoubtedly been noticing its completely lack luster performance. I’ve been trying to isolate the problem, and frankly I’ve been getting frustrated enough that I’ve considered just writing my own blogging software that merely shares Typo’s database back end.
Instead of doing that, I noticed that despite updates to the software on my system, I was still running an old version of Typo. It turns out you have to explicitly upgrade each deployment of Typo (not necessarily a bad thing). As always, there is an easy way to do this…. and it didn’t work for me (probably PEBKAC, but nonetheless frustrating). Anyway, after several false starts, I managed to upgrade to Typo 4.1.1.
There are a number of improvements that have come with upgrade that look to make life better on xblog. Oddly though, the new theming seems to be completely broken –except for on Safari. Yup, if you are looking at this with anything other than Safari (actually, I haven’t tested with Opera yet), you are probably seeing a pretty ugly looking site. Firefox shows the site as broken on Linux, Mac, and Windows. IE7 looks the same.
I haven’t diagnosed the how and the why behind all this, because I’ve been stunned by the downright awesomeness of this. The problem seems likely related to stylesheets, but for the life of me I am trying to figure out what is so different about my setup from a typical Typo configuration, and more importantly just look in awe at Safari.
Just How Great Is Safari? 2
Apple’s launch of Safari for Windows has been… interesting. As Corey pointed out, Safari doesn’t exactly make a compelling case for why you’d want to use it over the others. Then, on top of that, a hand full of exploits emerged within 24 hours of the launch, some within a couple of hours. Either Apple doesn’t know squat about secure programming on Windows or Safari has had all kinds of exploits lying in wait for broader exposure to the security community (probably both). Apple has now released patches which hopefully close out all the newly discovered exploits, but at this point Safari feels less secure than IE, which is saying a lot. But wait, it gets better…
So, one of the things I thought would be fun about using Safari on Windows is I could see what the web looks like from a loyal Mac user’s perspective (I empahsize loyal, because as far as I can tell most Mac users just use Firefox or Camino).
So, for starers, you gateway to the web is a massive promo page for Apple and Apple partners. I hope the people behind this stick to criticising Yahoo’s home page on aesthetic grounds only. Anyway, at the top of the page was a link to Celebrating the Best in Mac Software. Well, how could I not check out all the great software I was missing out on by not owning a Mac?
That’ when it got interseting. So, their highlighted category is “Leopard Application”, of course. Interestingly, neither winner nor runner-up got a web link. How odd. Anyway, going to the “developer” section (guess why), the runner up was rooSwitch. Not knowing what that was, I thought I’d check out the website. I clicked on the link and…. got a broken web page.
That’s right, rooSwitch was one of those sites that didn’t render properly in Safari. Yup, they got an away from the makers of Safari… and Safari can’t render it. Basically all the text on the page was invisible.
I’ve since downloaded Apple’s “Security Updates”, and now Safari renders the rooSwitch page correctly. Great, so it was a security problem?!
[voice mode=”Colbert Report] So horrible Apple product launch?…. or worst Apple product launch? ;-) [/voice]