Safari... so goody..?

• By Paul Crichton
• 21 Jun 07, 08:56 PM

Last week, Apple announced that it was launching a Windows version of Safari, its browser, which is the application you are using to read this article and surf the web with. When making the announcement, Chief Executive of Apple, Steve Jobs claimed that Safari was “the fastest browser on windows.”

People have been asking why Apple would want to take on the established players on the Windows platform, and some commentators, such as the BBC’s Technology Reporter, Jane Wakefield speculate that it may be to help developers create applications for the soon to be released Apple iPhone.

Yet interest in Safari clearly extends beyond the developer fraternity. Despite only being available for a matter of days, Apple are reporting over 1 million downloads of Safari in the first 48 hours, so people are clearly eager to see what the new kid on the block is like.

Reception has been divided. Writing on the blog, Read/Write Web, Josh Catone says that, “another quality, cross-platform browser is certainly a welcome announcement.” Elsewhere, writing for the Associated Press, Robert Weston says, “Safari for Windows offers little to browse home about.”

One thing nearly everyone can agree on is that the beta version is quite buggy, with crashes widely reported. Some people have said that it is more like an alpha version than a beta one.

I’ve taken Safari for a quick spin to see what it offers.

The first thing I noticed is that for users with less than perfect vision, dyslexia, and other learning difficulties, there is an issue with the way fonts are rendered. The text has a certain ‘fuzzy’ quality, making it harder to read than on other browsers. It is possible to change the settings to improve clarity, but it never looks really sharp. The How-To-Geek offers help to make those changes.

Safari does let a user change font sizes, to make text easier to read. And Safari has keyboard shortcuts for those who don’t get along with a mouse.

But there are few other features to assist in surfing the web. There is no equivalent, for example, to the ‘accessibility’ options, found in Internet Explorer, where a user can customise the appearance of a web page. This can greatly help people with dyslexia, for instance, as being able to give pages a pale blue background can make it a lot easier to read the content. If you think this could help you, then a step-by-step guide is available on My Web My Way.

If you are wondering how Safari works with screen readers, the software used by visually impaired users, it doesn’t. But then, no browser does when it first comes into the marketplace. It took a year of under the bonnet work before Firefox played well with screen reader software.

A spokesman for Freedom Scientific, the manufacturer of the JAWS screen reader, said that, “Whilst there are currently no plans to make Safari work with JAWS, that would change if there is demand for it from our customers.”

There are a number of other browsers out there that can make surfing the web easier than Safari does at the moment. At one end of the spectrum, there is WebbIE, a simple and easy to use text based browser for visually impaired people, that can be ideal for those new to the internet. At the other end, there is Firefox, which comes with a variety of add-ons designed specifically to improve accessibility, such as Accessibility Themes. This lets users add big and bright icons to the browser toolbar for ‘back’, ‘forward’ ‘home’ and so on. There is even a screen reader application for Firefox called Fire Vox.

Safari will certainly have its fans, and it will be fascinating to see how popular it becomes once it comes out of beta testing. But for the time being at least, there are other browsers available that are more helpful to those with accessibility considerations.

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