Apple released their own web browser back in January. The Apple faithful were delighted. The good news IMO was that they decided to adopt and open source project for their base. The bad thing was they went after a project that they knew they could dominate and control. The result is a browser that takes me back a few years when you had to test and re-test and make small changes just so your website would work in all the browsers out there (at that time it was really just Netscape and Microsoft IE).

In the last year, both Microsoft and the Mozilla project (the open source project that powers Netscape's Browser and newer versions of AOL) had made huge leaps toward standards compliance. So much so that the recent redesign of the dealnews web sites required almost no special changes for one browser versus the other.

Well, enter Safari. It was released as "beta" which means, not ready for everyday use. But the Apple faithful ignored that and jumped right on it. I immediately started getting reports from our users of dealmac.com that our site "did not work" in Safari. The truth is that Safari does not work right. The problems ranged from cookie issues to small cosmetic flaws. One odd thing was that certain ads we displayed would cause the right side of our site to "hang" off the page to the right in Safari. Very annoying. There is nothing wrong with the page. I had to basically refuse to "fix" our page on the basis that it is still beta software.

Now it seems Safari has some problems on some interal pages. Well, I have just recently been able to slim down that code to not care what browser the user was using. We do require our employees to use a "modern" browser when using our internal systems. But, it now seems that even more hacks and exceptions will be introduced to handle the poorly written, beta software.

Maybe Apple will get it together, but I doubt it. I have already seen one quote from and Apple developer claming that the other modern browsers do some things wrong and he is doing them right. I find that hard to believe. If Microsoft and Mozilla agree on something it is likely the correct way as they like nothing more than to prove each other wrong. I did find this blog from one of the Safari developers. I will follow it and see what we can get out of it.

So, if you are an Apple user and you are reading this, I encourage your to not use Safari. For all reading this, I reccomend using Mozilla for web browsing. It is faster and more reliable than any browser I have ever used.