This may be old news for most of you, but Apple has released Safari for Windows. You can get the download here.

Lots of people wrote about how increasing support for Safari increases support for the iPhone development community…

I’d like to focus on what it means for the web design/web standards community.

Simplified(?) Testing

My initial impression, like many others’, was to rejoice in the fact that I can now test Safari without having to buy a Mac. That impression turned to horror as I thought things through—what this really is is another browser, adding another layer of testing and complexity to my life. However, we can hope that Safari for Windows closely, if not identically, mimics the rendering behavior of Safari on a Mac.

Seeing as how I don’t own a Mac, I have no idea whether or not Safari is the same (or at least close) on both operating systems. Does anyone know?

Web Standards Support

Two months after Safari’s release, I have not heard of or encountered any real problems with Safari. It renders web pages in essentially the same way as Firefox and Opera—standards-compliant, that is.

Future Issues

Well, truthfully, going forward we hope there will be fewer and fewer issues. I’d love to see more and more browsers following tighter and better-managed specs for (X)HTML and CSS. Which browser you are using should fade in importance as far as web standards are concerned. The fact that Safari was released and then downloaded over 1 million times in 48 hours and hasn’t made any waves or compatibility issues is an encouraging step in that direction. Congratulations on a solid launch Apple, even though I haven’t made it my primary browser.