July 3rd, 2008
The browser download URLs, from 37signals’s announcement “Phasing out support for IE 6″:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/downloads/ie/getitnow.mspx?wt_svl=10005WDH_OS_Other1&mg_id=10005WDHb1http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/http://www.apple.com/safari/download/
As Denis says, you can pretty much type apple.com/<productname> and expect it to either work or at least redirect. Firefox’s URL isn’t too bad; Microsoft’s could use a lot of work. In fact, anything past the /ie/ is or should be completely redundant.
This isn’t just a minor nitpick. For one, it really shows which company’s culture emphasizes simplicity more. And, you can be sure which of the three is least likely to change after a re-design…
December 24th, 2007
Whether just for debugging purposes or as an option for end users isn’t clear yet, but WebKit on Windows now lets you render text using ClearType rather than Quartz. (Via Nick Shanks.)
I had to edit both the %AppData%\Apple Computer\Safari\Preferences.plist and %AppData%\Apple Computer\Safari\WebKitPreferences.plist files; otherwise, Safari would overwrite my changes with the previous setting. For both FontSmoothing and WebKitFontSmoothingType, an integer value of 4 will trigger the new behavior, as long as you have a nightly build of at least 28867.
As Nick notes, this doesn’t affect everything yet, but basic font rendering is clearly changed. I’m no fan of ClearType’s approach, but many do prefer it, and this may very well make Safari more attractive to them.
(If, on the other hand, you could provide me with a hack that makes Windows use Quartz… one can dream, right?)
