Said by someone that I'm going to have to assume never used the Windows version of Safari when it was available. I was one of those hard-core Mac users forced to use Windows for work, and...meh, it was easier to quit struggling against the restraints and just use Firefox if I wanted an alternative browser. I mean, Safari on Windows was fine (best I can remember), but the only thing it really seemed to bring to the table was "it looks like the browser on my Mac". Faster JS? Who cares? Geeks, that's who. And Apple isn't about to spend gazillions to write a Windows browser for geeks (hell, look at how they treat devs for their own platforms).

So when I use a Windows machine (ten years or so later, still have to use one for work), I just fire up Firefox, just like I'd do even if there were a current version of Safari for Windows. I have no ideological dog in this fight, so I'll go the easiest route that doesn't involve Edge or Chrome.

EDIT: oops, there's an HN bug. I went to update the original comment, and it posts this duplicate (with my updates) instead. I'll delete the original/dupe here in a minute or two.

This person lives in a fantasy land. Safari may be on a brief hot streak right now but they have a long and deep history of dragging feet and literally slowing down the entire ecosystem.

Apple still builds WebKit for Windows, and you can run it today! https://james.darpinian.com/blog/safari-on-windows

Of course, it's not Safari. But it could be useful for testing CSS quirks or similar without requiring a Mac. And if Apple wanted to ship Safari for Windows... well it would still be a tremendous amount of work. And I don't see what Apple would get out of it. But at least porting WebKit is already half done.

Yeah, "should", as in "Apple should invest millions of dollars in a product that (almost) nobody uses or cares about". Tweeting is easy, isn't it?

Why wait for Apple to do it? WebKit is Open Source and cross-platform, all of the tools to make a stripped-back, privacy respecting browser are right in front of you. Linux even has a couple WebKit-based browsers to prove that it's possible, although none of them are really that popular relative to Chrome or Firefox. All things considered, it's not surprising that Apple (or anyone really) hasn't done this.

One of the reasons I appreciate Safari on OS X is that it's one of the fastest and lowest power usage browsers due to Apple being intimately familiar with their internal APIs and hardware. I never got the same feeling of polish for any software Apple makes to run on Windows. I feel like a lot of what makes Safari worthwhile on OS X simply won't exist on a Windows version.

Please no. Safari is the browser that gives our company the most pain by far in terms of development and user experience.

And when I’ve personally tried using it on my various Macs over the years, I’ve always encountered bugs and glitches on websites that are seemingly not there with other browsers.

To be honest I’m pretty unhappy with a few of Apple’s “core” apps. Music is another dumpster fire...

That would be nice, Apple and Mozilla seems to be the only companies caring about efficiency..

https://medium.com/homullus/8-browsers-in-a-tiny-car-energy-...

Yes, please! More Webkit on Windows and in particular Safari of course for testing. But also for the sake of renderer competition. I don't think it'd hurt Apple other than maintenance overhead. Safari of all things never gave Apple the slightest of a competitive edge! iMessages and stuff did.

I'm also a weirdo in that I actually fancy macOS smoother "typeface-first" font hinting (or rather lack thereof) even if they become a bit "blurrier".

If we’re signing Apple up for big projects without any discernible benefit, why not shoot for the moon? Apple should release iOS for x86. Makes about as much sense.

I’m working full time in safari nowadays and very recently google decided that logins for accounts with yubikeys as required 2fa no longer can sign in without errors. I love safari but it’s frustrating that it’s still second class for even major companies like google to test their changes on.

Not quite sure I see Apple being willing to spend resources to make Windows less of an unpleasant cesspool, and even losing business if a few people, thanks to Safari, find it tolerable and don't switch to Apple.

Its like people are just trying to trigger me today. Windows has IE and edge, safari is just a slower more buggy version of that. I don't care if the js engine is 50% faster if its dom implementation doesn't follow any standard and the rendering engine is 200% slower.

If people cared about any of the above they would use edge not chrome and firefox, people care about stability and compaitibility.

Urgh no thanks.

We only just saw the end of IE6, don’t bring it back.

Safari is deliberately stunted, behind and incompatible.

Simple, top of the head example, where is AV1 video playback?

I don’t even use safari on Mac, why would I use it on windows?

ITunes for Windows - clearly Apple don't care about Windows.

For frontend developers, debugging in Safari can be quite challenging.