Font rendering can be different between Mac and Windows Safari as the systems typically have different fonts. As long as your page can gracefully handle missing fonts or different font sizes it should be fine.
Style sheet rendering is significantly different between Safari and Windows. To see this, try creating a page that has an element with a z-index of -1. The windows version will function without issue, the Mac version will not allow you to select the elements. Trust me, I wasted about three hours trying to figure out by trial and error why a page would work in one system but not the other. The worst bit is that when Safari doesn't render something properly, it does so without any indication. You have to debug line for line, a dreadful experience.
I am currently experiencing an issue where floating images in a blog with text wrapping around the image do not properly pad themselves in OS X; works fine in windows. Basically I've added padding to make the image align flush left or right such that the edge of the image is at the same offset as the edge of the text of the post; on OS X the image sticks out past the edge of the text.
Just wanted to add this experience I came across for Safari. Our devs are still going to look into this but not high priority for us since Windows Safari isn't much of our user base unlike Mac. But I think it relates to either (or both) - actual browser low level implementation of Safari by Apple, and/or javascript differences.
Our website recently implemented an HTML5 multiple file uploader. Single file uploads work fine on both versions of Safari. But when uploading multiple files, it fails on Windows. We had two different upload clients & endpoints for the uploader (think A/B testing flow), and one of them provided more details that may or may not point at the cause of the problem. On one of the client & endpoints, the client would send details of the filenames & filesizes of files to upload (as JSON array object) to the server endpoint (as seen via web inspector). On Mac where it worked, filesizes were valid, on Windows, they were 0 bytes.
I had an issue with the popup blocker in Safari in Windows XP. I guess the blocker didn't accept that the user clicked a link an Flash that then triggered a JavaScript that opened the Window. The did work in the other major browsers and Safari in OS X, though. Chrome also blocked my window in XP, but not in OS X or Ubuntu.
I am working on a website that has pretty standard layout. I have a box that contains other divs. It works on all major browsers, from IE6+, FF3+, etc. On Safari 5 on OSX, the box is totally to the left, outside the borders of my website. On the same safari version in windows, no problem.I am going crazy over this.
hi all, i'm using mac from past 3 months and i regularly use Safari browser for my browsing some of my college study portal, some websites like applevis etc. as i'm continuously seeing some of the post on this website regarding bugs in Safari browser and as I also experienced sluggishness while browsing the sites, so, wanted to no which brouzer people are using on mac to serf the internet. just now I have installed chrome and i'm feeling like its better than safari. for instence, it use to take lot of time to write any post in this website while using safari and the cursur use to jump here and their while reading my written text using aro keys, but i'm not experienceing that on chrome. need to test a bit more with other websites.
what do yall think about this? swiching to chrome is the best idea or sticking with safari. let me no.
thanks.
heck even microsoft abandoned their html engine for chromium.
to be honest i stopped using a mac when the zoom feature stopped following my keyboard focus and i swjitched to using a pc.
i just felt that apple was not giving accessibility on the mac the love it needs - at least for blind and visually impaired.
so i am thinking that you are pretty safe if you choose to use chrome and if it works for you.
it sure works for me on my windows pc with nerrator, nvda or jaws.
i also know that well at leaston a pc there are extensions to support keychain - i am not sure how that works on a mac though - that would maybe be the only factor that i would sorely miss.
To be more constructive, basically I use safari for most things. When some specific things don't work 99% because of voiceover I switch to chrome.
The real problem with chrome especially for those who come from a windows background is that first you have to press f7 to activate caret browsing, and even then for simple website if you use headings voiceover and keyboard won't follow each other except for progressive web apps like teams (you can forget using single letter navigation commands and only vo left right arrow elementt by element with vo cmd h-H and others for headings, links and other sementic navigation), plus voiceover on chrome tends to duplicate infinitely many times html grouping elements. Don't make the mistake of using grouped navigation (vo utility web), only dom order for chrome.
Safari is a piece of crap, but in my opinion it is still slightly less bad than Chrome. I think if you use the two and switch between them when you have issues then you can get most things done. I say this a lot but I slightly prefer Edge to Chrome - it is virtually identical except I just really like the Read Aloud option which is built in.
I think Chrome/Edge have a slightly better interface - tabs on Safari are just weird and the Tabs menu is nice. However, the History menu seems to have gone down the toilet - it doesn't show any actual pages in it any more. Guess it wants me to use the side bar or whatever but it's much less convenient. (Well I've not been bothered to figure it out yet anyway)
One slightly depressing advantage of Safari is that it is easier to report problems - just use the Apple email address. Not that anything will be fixed. Not sure how to contact Google for accessibility bugs. But there is then the grey area between what is a Chrome bug and what is a VoiceOver bug. Whereas with Safari it's always Apple's fault.
I find Safari to be mostly reliable with VoiceOver these days. Chrome triggers a bug that causes text to be skipped when trying to pan a braille display while reading. Safari is fine in this scenario, as was Firefox when I last tested it.
Safari is a web browser developed by Apple. It is built into Apple's operating systems, including macOS, iOS, iPadOS and visionOS, and uses Apple's open-source browser engine WebKit, which was derived from KHTML.
Safari was introduced in Mac OS X Panther in January 2003. It has been included with the iPhone since the first generation iPhone in 2007. At that time, Safari was the fastest browser on the Mac. Between 2007 and 2012, Apple maintained a Windows version,[6][7] but abandoned it due to low market share. In 2010, Safari 5 introduced a reader mode, extensions, and developer tools. Safari 11, released in 2017, added Intelligent Tracking Prevention, which uses artificial intelligence to block web tracking. Safari 13 added support for Apple Pay, and authentication with FIDO2 security keys. Its interface was redesigned in Safari 15.
Netscape Navigator rapidly became the dominant Mac browser after its 1994 release, and eventually came bundled with Mac OS.[8] In 1996, Microsoft released Internet Explorer for Mac, and Apple released the Cyberdog internet suite, which included a web browser. In 1997, Apple shelved Cyberdog, and reached a five-year agreement with Microsoft to make IE the default browser on the Mac, starting with Mac OS 8.1. Netscape continued to be preinstalled on all Macintoshes.[8] Microsoft continued to update IE for Mac, which was ported to Mac OS X DP4 in May 2000.[9]
On January 7, 2003, at Macworld San Francisco, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced Safari that was based on[12] WebKit, the company's internal fork of the KHTML browser engine.[13] Apple released the first beta version exclusively on Mac OS X the same day. Later that date, several official and unofficial beta versions followed until version 1.0 was released on June 23, 2003.[14][15] On Mac OS X v10.3, Safari was pre-installed as the system's default browser, rather than requiring a manual download, as was the case with the previous Mac OS X versions. Safari's predecessor, the Internet Explorer for Mac, was then included in 10.3 as an alternative.[16]
In April 2005, Engineer Dave Hyatt fixed several bugs in Safari. His experimental beta passed the Acid2 rendering test on April 27, 2005, marking it the first browser to do so.[17][18] Safari 2.0 which was released on April 29, 2005, was the sole browser Mac OS X 10.4 offered by default. Apple touted this version as it was capable of running a 1.8x speed boost compared to version 1.2.4 but it did not yet feature the Acid2 bug fixes. These major changes were initially unavailable for end-users unless they privately installed and compiled the WebKit source code or ran one of the nightly automated builds available at OpenDarwin. Version 2.0.2, released on October 31, 2005, finally included the Acid2 bug fixes.[19]
In June 2005 in efforts of KHTML criticisms over the lack of access to change logs, Apple moved the development source code and bug tracking of WebCore and JavaScriptCore to OpenDarwin. They have also open-sourced WebKit. The source code is for non-renderer aspects of the browser such as its GUI elements and the remaining proprietary.[20] The final stable version of Safari 2 and the last version released exclusively with Mac OS X, Safari 2.0.4, was updated on January 10, 2006, for Mac OS X. It was only available within Mac OS X Update 10.4.4, and it delivered fixes to layout and CPU usage issues among other improvements.[21]
On January 9, 2007, at Macworld San Francisco, Jobs unveiled that Safari 3 was ported to the newly-introduced iPhone within iPhone OS (later called iOS).[22][23] The mobile version was capable of displaying full, desktop-class websites.[24] At WWDC 2007, Jobs announced Safari 3 for Mac OS X 10.5, Windows XP, and Windows Vista. He ran a benchmark based on the iBench browser test suite comparing the most popular Windows browsers to the browser, and claimed that Safari had the fastest performance.[25] His claim was later examined by a third-party site called Web Performance over HTTP load times. They verified that Safari 3 was indeed the fastest browser on the Windows platform in terms of initial data loading over the Internet, though it was only negligibly faster than Internet Explorer 7 and Mozilla Firefox when it came to static content from the local cache.[26][27]
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