One more thing… Safari for Windows

I was going to write an article about the WebKit platform on Windows. About how the development of Swift has stalled and that the developer decided to move to the Mozilla Gecko engine while WebKit becomes more stable…. I was going to write about Apollo Adobe AIR and how you could use the build-in WebKit engine to easily build your own WebKit based browser in less than 30 lines of code. I was going to write about that Adobe already did the hard part and build a very basic browser called Scout…

I guess I can start all over. Steve Jobs just announced that Apple will bring Safari to the Windows platform. A public beta is available for download now.

The importance of a Windows browser based on WebKit – the rendering engine used by Safari – should be apparent for every web developer. If you wanted to make sure your site works on Safari and if you don’t own a Mac you had to rely on friends or one of those screenshot services. Alternatively you could use Swift or Scout for testing the basic functionality and rendering of the WebKit engine.

Testing for Safari has just become a whole lot easier and cheaper. You do not need to own a Mac any more to test how Safari renders your site. Nor do you have to work with some buggy or limited substitute. You can now test your sites in the real thing – Safari for Windows.

Some screenshots: