And as for disregarding the OS UI conventions, I think the worst offense is that Apple doesn’t put OK buttons in dialogs for their Windows apps; you’re expected to just close it and accept that your changes “took,” like they do on a Mac. On a Windows machine, that just feels weird.

Disclaimer: All hail Apple; Steve can do no wrong; Macs rule/PCs drool; yadda yadda ….

Obviously, from the rest of this post, I only agree with 1 of those statements. Macs do rule, and PCs do, indeed, drool.

You don’t have to be mean about it.

I prefer aliased text on body fonts — for headlines and larger text I prefer anti-aliased; and for some reason anti-aliased fonts in Photoshop look great to me — but I have always turned off text anti-aliasing in OS control panels. Call me weird; insult my design aesthetic if you must, but it’s what I perfer. It may be that I have super-human vision, though.

This is what bugged me about Safari (and IE7, for that matter): My OS has a control that lets me set my text rendering preference. However, Safari goes out of it’s way to ignore that setting, and then go a step further and *not allow me to turn aliasing off*. Safari has three types of blurry: light, strong, and medium, which is condescendingly labeled “best for flat panel”. I bet next that they’re going to tell me that the $1.49 Mega Big Gulp is the “best value”, too.

Seriously, the anti-aliasing of small fonts on Safari makes the page rendering look blurry and amateurish to me.

And this is not just me, there’s more on the font issue here: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000884.html

Disclaimer: All hail Apple; Steve can do no wrong; Macs rule/PCs drool; yadda yadda ….

Funny, I always though the ugly text rendering was built into the Mac; I was shocked to see it looked just as bad, with no way to turn off anti-aliasing. Seriously, the different perspectives are interesting.

If by “the different perspectives are interesting,” you mean “my opinion is completely in error” then yes, I agree with you. Text rendering on Windows machines looks like hairy, pimply ass. You can turn off the anti-aliasing in Windows Safari, though — in the preferences window there’s a “font smoothing” option. But gads, going from the text rendering in OS X to that of Windows is like going from an illuminated manuscript to an ImageWriter printout. I look at pages in Firefox under Windows and am confused because I didn’t remember traveling to the past.

However, I actually think you’re not giving Apple enough credit here … the reason Safari is shipping for Windows, and the reason it renders pages just like the Mac version, is specifically for the iPhone.

Sure, they do everything short of coming right out and saying that during the keynote. That doesn’t change the fact that with the “no SDK required!” development plan for the iPhone, they’re basically selling developers an empty box and then presenting slides bragging about how light the box is.

…so something is clearly screwed up with Apple apps and my Windows install. The Internet is not helpful at resolving this problem, and oddly enough, neither is uninstalling and reinstalling all of my Apple-created apps.

I haven’t had any problems with Windows Safari so far, but it doesn’t surprise me at all to hear other people are. The Apple apps for Windows look like they’re doing stuff with the system it just plain doesn’t want to do.

Usually, I’m pedantic enough that it bugs me irrationally when developers break an OS’s GUI conventions, but I give Apple a pass in this case if it means I get a web browser on Windows that doesn’t make Mosaic look good in comparison.

However, I actually think you’re not giving Apple enough credit here … the reason Safari is shipping for Windows, and the reason it renders pages just like the Mac version, is specifically for the iPhone. So they can make sure people who will never, ever buy an iPhone can make their web pages look pretty on it. And make their Javascript actually work on it.

Okay, I’ve spent most of my day blogging and commenting on this, and I don’t even use my mac or ipod. back to work ….

Glad Safari displays consistently across Mac and Windows. I am really really curious about this, because shitty browser-to-browser, OS-to-OS font support on the web is the bane of my professional existence, and I hope Apple really getting behind cross-platform browser consistency will maybe twist some arms (at least Mozilla’s arms) in that regard as well.