So I went out and installed Safari 3 for Windows yesterday.
I just had to see what all the fuss was about. How do you piss off a number of Windows users simultaneously? Release a product that has a different font rendering technology than their native OS.
Seriously, people are going nuts about this font thing. Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood have covered the details nicely, but I find it quite interesting that something so trivial can make such an impact. You generally don’t even think about it, but I’ve always noticed that Safari on Mac looked somehow different than Firefox on Windows. I’m not talking about the browser itself, I’m talking about the pages that get rendered.
I can see everyones argument, but I really happen to like the Apple mentality, and as Atwood says, this debate will be gone once higher dpi screens become available.
There is just something beautiful about the way that plain text looks with Safari, particularly at large sizes. At tiny sizes, however, I get a headache reading it.
Firefox is still my browser-o-choice, but Safari does give me a nice experience. I hope more Mac software ends up on Windows. Choice is good.