Safari for Windows

» see apple.com/safari/download as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

safari for windows arrived in 2007 and i was on firefox 2 and the still-dominant ie 6 on a windows xp box in ankara. the press around it was an apple event with steve jobs and a slide that read "the best browser on any platform". i tried the beta once over a ttnet line, the rendering looked off on the few turkish news sites i kept open, i closed it and went back to firefox.

the actual product launched as a public beta on june 11 2007 at wwdc in san francisco. windows xp and windows vista were both supported on day one. the pitch jobs gave was that internet explorer 7 held most of the windows browser share and firefox held the rest, that safari could be a third option built around speed and clean rendering, and that apple expected real growth out of it.

the first beta had serious bugs. heise security and a few independent researchers posted exploits within hours of the download going live. apple shipped a patched beta two within forty-eight hours and a 3.0 final by march 2008. on the surface that looked like a normal browser release pattern. underneath, the windows version never got more than a small fraction of internal engineering attention compared to the mac and the iphone builds. safari 4 in 2009 was the high point, briefly the fastest javascript engine on windows, then chrome shipped v8 and the speed claim disintegrated.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

the windows build was a port of the mac webkit and the cocoa look, rendered through apple's own widget set rather than the native windows ui. that meant the scrollbars and the tab strips on windows xp looked like a piece of mac os x had walked over and sat in the wrong room. some people loved that. most windows users found it foreign in a way they could not name. the trade-off was that the rendering of fonts was apple's, smoother than cleartype but blurrier to anyone who had spent ten years reading cleartype-rendered text.

the audience that did stick around was web developers who wanted webkit on windows without a mac. before chrome was webkit-based, safari for windows was the only way to test that the same html and css worked on the iphone browser. that use case kept downloads steady through 2008 and 2009. it was never the casual-windows-user audience apple had pitched.

~ the fall ~

chrome shipped in late 2008 with the same webkit engine, a better javascript core in v8, and a clean native windows feel. by 2010 every reason a windows user might have had to install safari was easier to get from chrome. apple's response inside the windows build was to ship fewer updates. safari 5 in june 2010 was the last major version. safari 5.1 followed in july 2011 alongside lion on the mac. then nothing for ten months.

5.1.7 shipped on may 9 2012. the version note from apple was a security patch that also disabled an outdated flash plugin. that was the last build. when safari 6 arrived in july 2012 it was mac-only, with no windows installer and no mention of windows on the download page. there was no press release announcing the end. the register and arstechnica wrote the obituary by piecing the absence together.

~ the legacy ~

safari for windows is one of two big apple cross-platform browser failures, sitting next to internet-explorer-for-mac on the other side. both were companies trying to push their browser onto the other platform during a window when browser share looked strategic. both quietly stopped when the cost of maintaining the second platform stopped being worth it.

the longer afterlife is webkit itself. webkit on windows was the rendering core inside safari and later inside qt-webkit and adobe air. chrome forked webkit to build blink in 2013. the engine apple shipped on windows for five years became the dna of the browser that took over the desktop and the android phone. safari for windows is the version of webkit that did not survive its own platform, but the code lived on inside someone else's window.

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