Back from the Dead: Using Apple’s Abandoned Safari for Windows Today

| Analysis

A Refreshing View

Even at its best, and despite Apple's insistence to the contrary, Safari for Windows wasn't clearly better than other Windows browsers available at the time, and it also fell short of its OS X counterpart in terms of performance. I'll also admit that, while all of my PCs at the time had a copy of Safari for Windows installed, it was never configured as my default browser.

So why do I now pine for Safari for Windows? One major reason is text rendering. Steve Jobs was famously obsessed with font design and typography, and that obsession carried over into Mac OS, OS X, and Apple's related software, including Safari. While things can vary based on fonts and layouts, in general, websites rendered in Safari just plain looked better than those rendered in other browsers like Chrome and Firefox.

Another reason is cross-platform compatibility, which sounds ridiculous from a neutral point of view but is exactly what I'm longing for as both a heavy OS X and Windows user. As I mentioned earlier, I use Safari on the Mac (and iOS, too), and I've found the process of keeping things like bookmarks and passwords synced with my Windows systems to be incredibly frustrating. Apple does indeed offer Bookmark syncing with Chrome, Firefox, and IE via the iCloud for Windows utility, but anyone who's actually used that feature will tell you that it's a bug-filled experience that will eventually lead to the mass duplication of all of your bookmarks across all platforms, no matter how carefully you set it up.

icloud utility for windows

I could solve my problems by, for example, switching to Chrome for all of my bookmark and password syncing, or by using third party services like Xmarks and LastPass to sync that data. But all of those solutions have limitations that don't give me the type of access I've come to enjoy and expect on my iDevices, and they each need to be individually controlled and secured, as opposed to letting Apple encrypt everything via my Apple ID.

Perhaps a version of me in an alternate universe where Safari for Windows saw continued development is happy, or perhaps that version of me is experiencing all sorts of new problems that we can't even think of yet, but the reality is that Safari for Windows is dead, likely forever. The question now is, it worth it to do a little grave robbing?

Back from the Dead

The last version of Safari for Windows was 5.1.7, released May 9, 2012. Apple no longer distributes it officially, but the installer can be easily found online at various sites that catalog software.

Although it was released two versions of Windows ago, and sports a design that would be unfamiliar to those who use Safari on the Mac today, I set out to test whether Safari for Windows is even usable and, if it is, what kind of performance sacrifices would need to be made vis-à-vis the primary browsers available for Windows today.

Compatibility

The first thing I needed to test was if Safari for Windows would even work at all on my Windows 10 PC. With advertised compatibility for Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7, I wasn't so sure. Thankfully, Safari installed just fine, and I had no problems getting it running in Windows 10.

safari for windows installer

The next step, of course, is to see how it performs. The following benchmarks were conducted on the standard high-end testbed I use at TekRevue:

CPU: Intel Core i7-5960X @ 4.0GHz
Motherboard: Asus ROG Rampage V Extreme
Memory: 32GB Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR4 2400MHz
Video: EVGA Nvidia Titan X 12GB
Storage: 512GB Samsung SM951 M.2 PCIe SSD
OS: Windows 10 64-bit

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Comments

Peter Dufosse

Great Article!

I used to use the heck out of that browser for my job and miss seeing on the Windows task bar as well.

Thanks for the walk down memory lane!
Cheers!
Pete

Glenn Marston

I used Safari for Windows on my work Windows machine. However, by 2014, I gave it up because it crashed too often and could not handle new Web material that had been developed post-Safari 5. While Safari was current on Windows, it was the best.

Jamie

same here. At the time, it was a stunningly good alternative to explorer, and I used it exclusively at my job, it was even better than Firefox then. Oh, those were the days. wink

11Al

I’m glad to know that I was not the only one in the world to use still Safari Windows and there are people esteems and uses it. I do also count Safari the best browser and use it in portable version. I have noticed that Safari works better on my Windows 8.1, compared to Windows 7. I must say that this old browser now 4 years aged, still does its job very well. Not or very few crash. Only problem, it doesn’t hold well opening many tabs at once, often automatically refreshes all them.

Jeremy Anderson

Web developer here. I just wanted to note that I use Safari for Windows but only for testing… Until today.

I work for a very large Community College District and we are just this week abandoning support for Safari for Windows. We cannot be the only ones. It’s getting very problematic to code responsive sites and oddly enough, some of the workarounds needed to fix iPhone issues actually cause issues in Safari for Windows (I’m looking at you iPhone hover emulator).

So, while it’s working OK on many sites currently, it’s going down the drain fast.

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