for those geeks who haven't noticed yet...

[blufive]

...There's a new web browser on the block.

[ok, link frenzy!]

Apple announced a new browser named Safari yesterday. It's based on the same engine as Konquerer, so it's fairly standards-compliant. Mark Pilgrim is doing a fair job of documenting issues; Codebitch wasted no time checking its CSS abilities, and Safari programmer Dave Hyatt demonstrates how good developers react to this kind of thing.

So, combined with the news that Chimera is doing very nicely, it looks like Mac OS X has a real browser war on its hands.

Comments

New browser?

[replyhazy.livejournal.com]

* la, la, la, la, la * (hands over ears)

I'm pretending not to hear you. I just can't face adding yet another browser to our browser test lab. We're already standing around trying to come up with a spot for AOL 8 (not that we want to)... I suppose the poor little blue iMac on OS X will just have to suffer yet one more installation.

Re: New browser?

[blufive.livejournal.com]

heh. From what I'm reading, it's not too badly-behaved. Konq is one of the more successful browsers on Linux, and has a reputation for being OK standards-wise. It sounds like the only changes they've made are to fix things.

Which AOL 8? The Windows version is IE in disguise (yes, I know AOL browsers have bugs that IE doesn't, but I think they've been getting better in recent years). On other platforms, I think it's Mozilla/Gecko based, so it's a bit different but, again, a lot better than some browsers I could mention.

Re: New browser?

[replyhazy.livejournal.com]

The whole thing with AOL sitting on IE drives us nuts, because customers read their weblogs and say, "Oh, nobody on AOL visits our site." Yes they do... the weblogs just count them as IE. Arg!

And just when are they going to dump the IE for the Netscape code they bought? When, huh?

Re: New browser?

[blufive.livejournal.com]

As I mentioned, they're already using gecko on mac, at least. I've seen some very fuzzy stats today (and all stats are fuzzy, of course) suggesting that AOL accounts for about 5% of browsers. If you can actually get at the raw logs, AOL does show up in the user agent strings, but most stats packages are clueless about that sort of thing.