Ryan Joy (atxryan)

Looks like the rumors were true: Safari 3 beta is available for Windows. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out in market share, not to mention the developer headaches.

The ability to drag tabs to their own window is a neat feature that brings that Mac ‘flavor’ to the Windows environment. I can’t think of a single other Windows application that has this intuitive functionality. In fact, too many applications don’t even support re-ordering the tabs at all!

Interestingly the Safari installation includes the fonts Lucida Grande and Lucida Grande Bold in \Program Files\Safari\Safari.resources\. My first thought was that this was for side-by-side comparisons between websites in Safari on OSX and Safari on Windows, but then why did Apple only include those two fonts? And why not put them in the main Windows font directory? Doing so would enhance their prevalence among designers and probably even fuel more Safari downloads as blogs/tech zines/personal websites started evangelizing with “Get Safari” buttons in an effort to homogenize the typographic web. Instead, I realized that the inclusion of these two fonts was probably solely for the Safari file menu labels and such. I confirmed this by moving two different fonts into the Safari.resources folder and renaming them as the installed fonts (after backing up the originals, of course!). This changed the font that Safari used to convey that Mac ‘flavor’ I mentioned before.

I will test tomorrow, but I wonder if websites rendered in Safari using Lucida Grande will even have access to the font? I doubt it, unless I installed it as a system font on my machine. Why would their rendering engine have a special use-case scenario for a single font instead of relying on the system paths?

Update: I was mistaken about whether Safari would actually use Lucida Grande when it rendered web pages. I set up a test case here: http://lab.atxryan.com/safari_windows_font_test.html where you can see how it renders in different browsers. If both headlines are in Courier, then your browser does not have access to Lucida Grande. I find it extremely odd that programming convention seemed to be thrown out the window (pun intended) by setting up this special use-case.