Safari for Tablet PCs, UMPCs: no TIP for you...next!

Well, I couldn't let a new download sit and wait on the web, so I pulled down the beta of Safari for Windows on my Samsung Q1P UMPC. Of course, the first thing I looked for was support for ink and as expected, it's not there. Vista's Tablet PC functionality simply doesn't recognize any of the text boxes, so I can already see that I won't be using Safari on a regular basis for this machine. To make matters worse for Tablet PC and UMPC owners, the TIP only works with the on-screen keyboard. You can't enter a URL in Safari via handwriting recognition nor with the character pad which makes it relatively unusable for me at the moment. Navigational pen flicks do work as expected since they're part of the Tablet functionality within Vista, so you can drag a web page up or down, move forward and back. To be fair, this is a beta...but not a good one for us that 'think ink'. ;)

Comments

[John Crichton]

hello,
stop me if i'm wrong, but opera does not support TIP too, (and that's a big pain for me, cause i love the fit to width fonctionnality).
Firefox does not support natively TIP too, GeckoTIP extension is needed to use Inking.
Then it's not very surprising.

[Kevin C. Tofel]

John, there's a bit more to it. You're correct that neither Opera nor Firefox support ink natively (i.e.: the floating tip won't pop up) but there's a big difference that I've pointed out.

If you're running Opera or Firefox and open up the Tablet PC Input Panel from the toolbar, you can use all three input methods from the TIP for the browser. Not so with the Safari beta, which makes it harder to use for Tablet PC and UMPC owners. You have only two native choices to use this version of Safari: the on-screen keyboard in the TIP or a physical keyboard.

[Steve Paine]

I just tried it and dumped within 10 mins too.
No tip.
Couldnt find fullscreen either.
No noticeable improvement in speed over ff either.
Steve

[Nikooo]

It is indeed fast... I installed it on a USB key and it works very well. I may stick to it for a while :)

[Mickey Segal]

This explains what Apple has been working on instead of getting QuickTime to run on Vista.

Apple claims:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9024298 "that the beta of Safari 3 is more than twice as fast as Internet Explorer on Windows XP, and 1.6 times faster than Firefox."

[JohnNull]

No fullscreen is a non-starter for use on a UMPC. As for speed, Safari is rendering pages slower on my XP laptop than IE or Firefox, at least for the sites I frequent. In fact jkontherun is taking twice as long to render than IE in my informal testing.

As for its use as a dev platform for iphone and a stealth take-over plan... Seems to me that if you were developing a new Web 2.0 app, you'd be better off writing your app to be standards compliant rather than supporting only a single browser. I just don't see the point of Safari on Windows.

[James Kendrick]

T don't even use Safari on my Mac, why should I run it on my Vista device?

[Nikoooo]

How do you increase the speed of Firefox? Because on my mac and although I am using the last version, it is sometimes painfully slow. Opening JKonTheRun takes quite some time, especially when it loads the adds before rendering the interesting part (ie the center)...

Thanks for the tips, although that's a bit of topic!

[Kevin C. Tofel]

Nikoooo, I highly recommend the Fasterfox plugin for Firefox: http://fasterfox.mozdev.org/

[bobm]

OK, pardon the cluelessness here but shouldn't the OS hide the ink functionality from the apps so that each app doesn't have to be made ink aware?

If I put something like vim (one of the most primitive editors) on a tablet does it not work with ink?

Not a flame, just a question from someone waiting for the new Fujitsu to come to market.

[Neil Anderson]

Maybe the slow loading times are because the site hasn't put any info into cache? What are subsequent rendering times? According to Apple the 2x as fast as IE7 and 1.6x Firefox HTML and JavaScript benchmarks are based on VeriTest's iBench Version 5.

[PJE]

bobm, Apple don't use standard windows controls they roll their own (and don't follow windows standards).

I tried Safari but until it can handle tabs better (why can't I open a bookmark in a new tab), and has mouse gestures I'll stick with Opera 9.

BTW, as apple paints the whole window, ignoring the windows header, why can't they aff the menu to the top thus saving screen space.

[Josh Einstein]

bobm, it's not necessarily cluelessness on your part, but it is cluelessness on Apple's (or Mozilla's) part. The bottom line is, when you develop software for an operating system, it is your responsibility to learn how that OS works and implement your software in accordance with the standard practices.

Windows supports and recommends a set of accessibility interfaces. Because Windows is used by 95% of the computing world, it needs to be able to work in a variety of scenarios including for people with disabilities. The Tablet PC and speech recognition functionality was built around the implementation of these accessibility API's. When you use standard Windows controls you get these "for free" for the most part.

When you go off and port your crappy OSX code to Windows and insist on adding your own window chrome and your own look and feel just because you want to brand the Windows desktop with a little bit of OSX style, it is your responsibility to implement these interfaces.

Apple neglected to do so, and completely breaks the consistent look and feel of Windows with all of their apps and somehow its "the world's best browser".

[Tim Marman]

Forget TIP support... I haven't been able to use it because beta 3 apparently doesn't include proxy support (the option is there but grayed out).