| Tuesday, June 12, 2007 |
16:27 - I turn my back for four days...
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Sheesh—I can't even go to Maine for a college friend's wedding aboard a Maine Windjammer schooner without Apple doing something wacky like releasing Safari for Windows.
Word on the grapevine is that the Windows version uses Mac-style antialiasing, which strikes me as a grand idea—every time I look at any Windows browser, whether IE or Mozilla, my eyes start to squirm out of my head (note: click "17" in the upper right) looking at the funky rainbowy subpixel rendering and the spidery non-WYSIWYG letter forms. Via David G., Joel Spolsky has some thoughts on why this is so:
Typically, Apple chose the stylish route, putting art above practicality, because Steve Jobs has taste, while Microsoft chose the comfortable route, the measurably pragmatic way of doing things that completely lacks in panache. To put it another way, if Apple was Target, Microsoft would be Wal-Mart.
Interesting. But I'll be looking forward to the days when I can write for Safari and not feel like it's just some set of ghettoized deviants who see my sites the way I intend, even if it's really all my fault if I don't test in IE and Mozilla and everything else anyway.
UPDATE: There's no way that I'm the only one for whom Windows does things to text like this (IE6):
Or this (IE7, and this is after running the ClearType Tuner thingy):
As opposed to, say, this (Safari, in which bold and italics actually work, antialiasing doesn't turn text into a painful blur, and it doesn't look like each word got a random kerning value picked out of a hat):
I mean, Windows habitually confronts me with stuff like:
And... everyone's okaaaaay with this?
UPDATE: Stephen Rider has thoughts.
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Brian Tiemann
