Dev411 Blog

Let's face it, testing a website with OS-X's Safari browser can be difficult if a Mac doesn't happen to be available. Many developers only have non-Apple Intel-based hardware and run both Linux and Windows which allows for testing of Firefox and IE. Unfortunately this doesn't work for Safari because:

• Safari not available on Windows or Linux: this would be great
• OS-X is not (legally) available on non-Apple Intel hardware: this would also be great
• OS-X is difficult to run on VMWare: OS-X has been installed on VMWare running non-Apple hardware but it's been reported difficult to do with many hardware/driver issues. Although VMWare recently announced their software will run on OS-X, I think it would be more useful for OS-X to run in a VM on non-Apple hardware.
• Although Safari is based on the KHTML layout engine, Apple has made numerous modifications that haven't been backported to KHTML. People have used the KDE Konqueror browser as a proxy in the past because it also uses KHTML, however this isn't a good solution now because of the divergence. Apple may be improving their contributions, but testing this way isn't reliable at the moment.

Regardless of whether people should buy Apple hardware or not, the end effect is that fewer websites are tested against Safari.

Along comes Swift to the rescue. Swift is a WebKit-based browser for Windows. WebKit is Apple's open source browser engine that includes their version of KHTML. Theoretically using Swift on Windows will give you the same layout as Safari on OS-X. It's still alpha software and has been reported to not do logins (HTTP posts), but the idea is promising.

The best way to test Safari right now is to get Apple hardware, however this isn't an option for everyone. Swift could be the ticket to increasing the number of websites tested for Safari, or at least WebKit. It will be interesting when the project reaches beta or release stage.