Calum ([info]zootm) wrote,
@ 2007-06-12 10:04:00
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Current music:Biffy Clyro - Living is a Problem Because Everything Dies

Safari on Windows

My notes (so far!):

  • Anyone using this for normal browsing should probably stop now, they've apparently (and most of them haven't been properly confirmed, but better safe than sorry and all that) found six or seven serious security flaws in it so far, so I'd wait until they've done a proper security audit.
  • Other than the fact that Apple stubbornly refuse to follow the Windows HIGs (that is, it doesn't look or work like a Windows app, meaning it's a bit of a confusing/inconsistent affair) Safari is still a great browser, and KHTML/WebKit is a great HTML renderer. I've wanted there to be a version of KHTML for Windows or a KHTML browser for GNOME for some time (the open sourceWindows effort, Swift, is still extremely shaky, although it seems like the "proper" solution for a Windows KHTML/WebKit browser). It's good to see this around.
  • Being able to see our Safari rendering bugs in Windows is excellent at work. As well as making it easier for some people to move to OS X,
  • The Apple greyscale font rendering looks really weird next to Windows Cleartype (subpixel) font rendering. I wonder if Apple are planning to put a proper subpixel renderer (or, you know, use the Windows font rendering) in the Windows Safari at some point?
  • Stop bundling Quicktime with everything, Jobs! *shakes fist*

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[info]Craig Webster [xeriom.net]
2007-06-12 12:09 pm UTC (link)
Safari on Windows would be great except the majority of Mac users use OS X and don't care about Windows. I'd have preferred Apple to be working on stuff that I'd actually use... at the moment, based on the features shown at WWDC, Leopard isn't looking all that exciting.

I do like the sound of the iPhone "SDK" though :)

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[info]zootm
2007-06-12 12:14 pm UTC (link)
ZFS is a much bigger thing, in my opinion, than is typically being made out.

Also, Mac users don't matter to the Safari on Windows thing, since it's not aimed at Mac users. Apple's strategy is clearly to tempt people to move to OS X; and at that point, it becomes an advantage to existing OS X users, because more OS X users means more money for Apple to spend on OS X.

The iPhone SDK is a good step forward from "we are genuinely too incompetent to properly implement a safe development environment for the device", which was the opinion before. It's not full, obviously, but it goes a long way towards fixing one of the major concerns about it.

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[info]Craig Webster [xeriom.net]
2007-06-12 12:30 pm UTC (link)
ZFS does look pretty neat, yea, can't wait to play with that.

Also, Mac users don't matter to the Safari on Windows thing, since it's not aimed at Mac users.
I understand their desire to tempt people over, but the features shown at WWDC could have been better and I suspect they would have been if Safari on Windows wasn't a priority. I guess I'm just a little underwhelmed. I hope some of the other 290 features are better than the 10 shown.

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[info]zootm
2007-06-12 12:33 pm UTC (link)
I'm always underwhelmed by OS X features, they tend to get overblown very easily. Dashboard was cool, but it's not like it wasn't already available everywhere else. The main "really cool" thing they did was Exposé, but I think beyond that one needs to remember that OS X updates are rarely up to the unbelievable levels of hype that the Apple marketing machine can put out.

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[info]Craig Webster [xeriom.net]
2007-06-12 12:38 pm UTC (link)
Hmm that's true. I guess for 10.4 I was looking forward to Java 5 support. Along those lines, I'm now waiting for decent Rails support in 10.5. I just hope they're not as slow as they were with Java and that they don't screw it up Ruby like they did in 10.4.

Stacks do look interesting, although until I actually use them I won't be able to tell how useful they are. Similarly with Spaces.

Where about are you working just now btw?

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[info]zootm
2007-06-12 12:54 pm UTC (link)
Rails support is a bit of a pain from what I've heard. It's not the best server system. Being a Python Man I'm more interested in Django, but there's no denying the role of Rails in making dynamic web programming more interesting for everyone, especially taking away the percieved dependence on PHP.

I'm working for a company called Cognia at the moment. How's Xeriom going?

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[info]Craig Webster [xeriom.net]
2007-06-12 01:08 pm UTC (link)
Rails is really easy to support, the problem is in deciding which path to take. Once a certain configuration is decided to be the best, the majority of the community will adopt it... trouble is, for something like the production environment there are just so many options and opinions, and then Apache or Lighty or Mongrel changes. I'm a bit of a fan boy, so I'm willing to admit that I'm probably fairly biased when it comes to how great Rails is.

I've never used Python, though Django does look very interesting... I'm hoping that the upcoming Refresh Edinburgh session will let me see what I'm missing out on.

Cognia looks pretty interesting. How are you finding it? Handling Bio-Informatics data scares me a little - the legacy systems seem so unstructured that I'm surprised anyone got any work done at all, and migrating them to a sane system is pretty hard.

Xeriom is going strong; I hope to have another rack on the go (and mostly full) by the end of the year, and when I get a few hours free I intend to write a website for a subsiduary that does Rails development (which is where I spend most of my time currently, and is why I'm looking forward to better Ruby and Rails support from Apple). If Cognia (or anyone else you know) needs any rack space or servers, I can do them a good deal ;)

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[info]zootm
2007-06-12 01:13 pm UTC (link)
Haha, I'll see what I can do but I think that hosting is done from here or something at present. I think the main problem I heard from deploying Rails was that it's a pain to integrate it with IIS, which it shouldn't be, but I suppose most people using Windows Servers will be less likely to be using Rails in the first place!

Cognia work is good, yeah, happily I'm working on the "sensible" system to replace the less-structured one you mentioned in the first place. It's Java web dev stuff, which can be a little heavyweight but it mostly ok. Happily they had most data in a very large, complex Oracle database structure, which while complicated means there's at least a little granularity.

What's the Refresh Edinburgh thing? Sounds interesting.

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[info]Craig Webster [xeriom.net]
2007-06-12 01:33 pm UTC (link)
Refresh Edinburgh: http://refreshedinburgh.org/
I think there's a planed discussion of the differences between Django / Rails and some PHP frameworks on the 22nd. Check the mailing list for details.

Yea, Rails will be a pain to deploy to IIS... mainly because the majority of the Rails community don't care about IIS. Rails is targetted for a *NIX environment, and while it's possible to deploy to a Windows platform so few people do that it's not shown much love. On the other hand, it's /really/ easy to install and deploy a Rails app to a Ubuntu 6.06 platform: http://deprec.rubyforge.org/

Do you have to play with the Chado+EVO schema? That thing is sinister.

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[info]zootm
2007-06-12 01:35 pm UTC (link)
Happily I have not even heard of that schema. The database schema we have is pretty proprietary, I'm led to believe it's good but I really don't know (or care) enough about SQL to assess that ;)

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[info]Craig Webster [xeriom.net]
2007-06-12 01:36 pm UTC (link)
Down with SQL! Long live ORM!

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[info]zootm
2007-06-12 01:38 pm UTC (link)
That's my kind of slogan!

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[info]xzxzzx
2007-06-12 03:31 pm UTC (link)
"iPhone SDK" my ass. Web apps rock hardcore, but they're not usable for everything, damn it!

And until the iPhone has a CPU in the yottaflop range (ok, maybe exaflop would do), they're not gonna be.

Ye cannae ignore the hardware! It's. just. not. practical!

Abstrations cost cycles!
Abstrations cost cycles!
Abstrations cost cycles!

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[info]zootm
2007-06-12 03:33 pm UTC (link)
Must... not... mock spelling of "abstraction"...

And yes, as much as their approach is insufficient for many application domains (games, in particular), it's sufficient for most of the stuff that people actually want to do with the device. It's just a pity that it's not quite "complete".

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[info]xzxzzx
2007-06-12 04:03 pm UTC (link)
Grrr. No! maybe, and only maybe, if multitouch support were built in, it'd be enough for "most of the stuff".

And as for "Abstration"... I'm far too lax on typos, and apparently too liberal with Copy + Paste.

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[info]Craig Webster [xeriom.net]
2007-06-12 03:55 pm UTC (link)
Wouldn't a yottaflop be 10^24 flops and an exaflop be 10^18 flops?

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[info]zootm
2007-06-12 03:56 pm UTC (link)
Why would that be an issue with what he said? :S

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[info]Craig Webster [xeriom.net]
2007-06-12 04:00 pm UTC (link)
"As of 2006, the fastest supercomputer's performance tops out at one petaflops [10^15 flops]"
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS

Have I picked up something wrongly?

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[info]zootm
2007-06-12 04:03 pm UTC (link)
I think he was implying that because of the slowness of Javascript, the device would have to be stupidly fast to do what he wanted.

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[info]xzxzzx
2007-06-12 04:04 pm UTC (link)
Yes. That's the idea. If the iPhone were as powerful as the world's fastest supercomputer, then JS might be sufficient.

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[info]Craig Webster [xeriom.net]
2007-06-12 04:06 pm UTC (link)
Ah, right. Well yes, if too much JavaScript is used then sure, but a combination of AJAX to push the calculation to the server and Google Gears or Slingshot to keep it responsive and make it work in a semi-connected manner makes the right amount of Javascript work well.

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[info]xzxzzx
2007-06-12 04:08 pm UTC (link)
Imagine a GPS navigation software with a 3D display of the roads, as if it were flying above and a little behind you. It isn't just flashy, it's fantastically useful when driving around an area you don't know.

Now do it on JS on an iPhone. Good luck. :p

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[info]Craig Webster [xeriom.net]
2007-06-12 04:11 pm UTC (link)
Sounds like a fun challenge. If the iPhone provides an easy way to get the current location, I might give it a try :)

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[info]xzxzzx
2007-06-12 04:15 pm UTC (link)
Hehe. Good luck indeed! I'd use it.

However, there's no GPS built into the iPhone, and I doubt there is a "bluetooth JS module" for access to a bluetooth GPS receiver.

Direct access to the accelerometer in the thing would actually help a ton too...

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[info]Craig Webster [xeriom.net]
2007-06-12 04:17 pm UTC (link)
Oh bums. Guess I'll have to find somethig else I can do with it.

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[info]zootm
2007-06-12 04:13 pm UTC (link)
You could probably do it with a <canvas>, not sure how successful you'd be! You could do a Classic Racing Game-style pseudo 3D thing...

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[info]xzxzzx
2007-06-12 04:17 pm UTC (link)
Sure you could. And it'd be fast enough on, say, a desktop machine. Maybe.

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[info]zootm
2007-06-12 04:20 pm UTC (link)
You need to think outside the box!

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[info]xzxzzx
2007-06-12 04:30 pm UTC (link)
o_O

Do the processing on a server? (No, not enough bandwidth...)

Fake the 3d completely? (That... could work... it'd still be too slow, but maybe you could push a fps or two out of it...)

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[info]xzxzzx
2007-06-12 04:06 pm UTC (link)
On another thread -- yeah, it's nice having Safari on Windows, for the reasons you mention, but fuck, man, I can't stand to look at the thing. Using your own font rendering on another OS with no way of turning it off is bad, mmmkay?

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[info]zootm
2007-06-12 04:07 pm UTC (link)
It's greyscale rendering too, which makes it look pretty stupid compared to Cleartype on Windows. It might work well if they include a subpixel one too in the future.

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[info]xzxzzx
2007-06-12 04:12 pm UTC (link)
True. Turning it down to "light" smoothing helps, but if you've got an option for the thing, why not an option to turn it off?

Also, since I use a light-on-dark color scheme in Windows, much of the UI is fucked because they only respect the text color, but not the background color.

Nice for testing reasons, but it's going to be relegated to that on my machine, at least until the major flaws are ironed out.

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[info]zootm
2007-06-12 04:16 pm UTC (link)
Most renderers don't have a very good render mode for smoothing "off". In fact the only decent one I know of is the one in Windows. It probably doesn't have an off mode because it looks rubbish.

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[info]xzxzzx
2007-06-12 04:33 pm UTC (link)
Really? How hard is it to render a font?

You have to kern, of course, but it seems like you'd have to do that for smoothed text anyway.

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[info]zootm
2007-06-12 05:10 pm UTC (link)
It's hard to render a font (especially fonts which weren't designed for it - the Microsoft set are very carefully made for this) without it looking strange without some form of smoothing. Switching the font smoothing mode in an X server to "monochrome" while using anything but the MS fonts shows this quite well. It's just a complex thing to do while keeping things readable, and since their font renderer appears to be completely independent of the Windows one they probably just didn't bother with it.

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[info]xzxzzx
2007-06-12 06:45 pm UTC (link)
Bah.

Well, I can see why they wouldn't use the Microsoft renderer—this way, the pages probably render exactly the same as if they were on a Mac.

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[info]zootm
2007-06-12 06:48 pm UTC (link)
That said if "exactly the same as on a Mac" means "blurry and shite" they might need to think twice ;)

Mac font rendering looks great with subpixel etc. turned on, so hopefully they'll add that anyway.

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[info]kurisu
2007-06-12 06:53 pm UTC (link)

Joel Spolsky has a very good article on the subject. Although you claim that Apple uses greyscale rendering, he claims that they both use subpixel rendering and the difference in rendering is due to different priorities when it comes to accurate rendering of the font.

However, I'm quite ready to say that you're right and he's wrong on the subject, because of one thing. On Windows, with Cleartype enabled, I can see red and green on the edges of the fonts plain as day, and it pisses me off. I don't see this on my Mac, so it's possible that it doesn't use subpixel rendering. In any case, this is one (but as the article says, by no means the only) reason that I prefer reading text on my Mac to reading on Windows.

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[info]zootm
2007-06-12 07:03 pm UTC (link)
Joel Spolsky has a very good article on the subject. Although you claim that Apple uses greyscale rendering, he claims that they both use subpixel rendering and the difference in rendering is due to different priorities when it comes to accurate rendering of the font.

I think you misread. The Windows version of Safari is only using greyscale rendering. It looks quite blurry and horrid on LCD monitors.

I really like how fonts are rendered on OS X, although I think Cleartype is a little clearer for smaller fonts. I've got my X server in Linux set up to render somewhere between the two systems and I'm loving it awesome style. :)

For what it's worth, there is a small percentage of the population who do see the colours in subpixel systems. If you're not seeing them on OS X I'd check that the monitor is set up correctly on Windows, but it's possible that you're just one of those that sees them.

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[info]kurisu
2007-06-12 09:30 pm UTC (link)

I should also mention that it could well be to do with resolution. My Mac screen probably has the highest number of pixels per inch out of all the screens I use. The work screen is slightly less, and the effect is noticeable, but on my 15" monitor at home it's really noticeable. So it's possible that on my Mac, the subpixel rendering is just too small to see.

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[info]zootm
2007-06-12 10:06 pm UTC (link)
That's also possible, yeah. There's a lot of factors in these things. I suppose you'd be quicker and easier just figuring out what you don't like and disabling it most of the time!

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[info]zootm
2007-06-12 07:09 pm UTC (link)
No wait, I misread the article. Curses. But yeah, it still looks inconsistent on Windows.

And I guess that it's true that Apple are trying to make fonts look nice and Microsoft are trying to make fonts easy to read. It's an interesting difference in philosophy.

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[info]kurisu
2007-06-12 07:02 pm UTC (link)

As a Mac user, I can't stand the look of iTunes and Safari on Windows. It looks like a bad skin. I can sympathise with having it look like that on XP (which, in any state, looks almost as hideous imho), but Vista looks good. iTunes and Safari using native Vista widgets would look good.

Apparently Apple are going to start bundling Safari with iTunes once it's out of beta. This is how they're going to get it into the hands of ordinary users. I can see that they have a point (how else are they going to tell non-Mac users about it?), but at the same time, nooooooo...

AJAX on the iPhone could be an interesting lunchtime discussion with my boss. He's keen on AJAX at the moment because it makes it easy to make changes to our software, and I'm quietly hoping that he's going to be picking up an iPhone later in the year for business purposes. But it'll be interesting to hear the opinion of someone with experience programming for phones...

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[info]zootm
2007-06-12 07:06 pm UTC (link)
iTunes and Safari using native Vista widgets would look good.

I agree. It's bad enough that Apple don't even use native widgets on their own operating system, but at least in that case they make some effort towards making it look consistent. iTunes on Windows is a terrible hack in a lot of regards, sadly.

But it'll be interesting to hear the opinion of someone with experience programming for phones...

I have experience programming for phones! Someone get me an iPhone, I have tons of opinions!

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[info]kurisu
2007-06-12 09:25 pm UTC (link)

I agree. It's bad enough that Apple don't even use native widgets on their own operating system, but at least in that case they make some effort towards making it look consistent.

Ha, funnily enough one of the changes that's coming in Leopard is greater UI consistency. No more Brushed Metal or old-style Aqua, everything will use the Unified theme. Which I suppose is a good thing (there are subtle differences in the behaviour of the different themes), but it's bad for me as I use Exposé a lot, and it makes windows harder to distinguish. Seriously, the new Finder looks exactly like iTunes.

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[info]zootm
2007-06-12 10:05 pm UTC (link)
They'll use the unified theme, but I don't know if they'll use their own widgets. It often seems like their own toolkit is somehow insufficient for them? Hopefully they'll get it sorted; the Core Blah libraries have come forward a lot recently and should allow them the freedom they want.

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