Apple has released its Safari 3 for Mac and Windows platforms, a tactical move for them to sow the seeds of the browser war in the future. Coined as twice as fast as IE 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2, according to Apple’s press release. Currently, Safari 3 offered in three different versions, i.e. Safari plus QuickTime for Windows XP and Vista, or a solely Safari executable file and the Safari for Mac OS X version 10.4.9 or later, as listed in Apple’s Safari download page. But I’m not so sure whether this Safari 3 for Windows platform will be regarded as a product that clamored by the Windows users?

However, the most interesting part is that Apple have to pacify some of the critics especially this newly release product may have easily been hit by bugs. Though Apple not officially comment on this issue, hot on the wheel of this potential problem come another one, Safari 3 does not support Chinese character in a proper manner. According to a Chinese blog (in Mandarin), in order to use Safari 3 to view the Chinese character, two (2) main prerequisites must be fulfilled: A user’s system must have pre-installed Microsoft JhengHei, one of the popular East Asian User Interface fonts; A user must also customize her browser’s character encoding to this Microsoft JhengHei as well.

I predict that there’s more to develop if Apple really want to earn a chunk of the market share among the Windows users.

Tagged as: Apple, browser, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Windows Vista