Testing in Safari 2 and Safari 3?
I recently wrote about keeping Safari 2 after installing Safari 3 beta. Turns out, as I corrected in the original entry, that isn’t true. This leads me to a question, What are people going to do to test both sites in both Safari 2 (Tiger’s shipping version of Safari) & Safari 3 (Leopard’s shipping version of Safari)? There is no question that Safari 3 is a large leap ahead of Safari 2 with regards to correct CSS rendering, but that only matters if 80% of the Tiger users upgrade to Leopard–which seems doubtful. This leaves 2, relatively painless possibilities for web designers and 1 option that would put many designers in a bind:
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Apple releases Safari 3 to Tiger users through Software Update
Upgrading all Tiger users to Safari 3 would be the desired course of action from the web community. We’d likely see Safari 2’s usage fade rather quickly and it would allow web designers to focus on supporting web standards and not maintaining an override stylesheet for Safari 2.
I also see this as a smart move for Apple; Safari is only getting better rendering support and is even faster than Safari 2. Not to mention, Apple would then have both Windows and Mac users on the same browser version and they could start fading support for Safari 2.
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Apple releases a standalone version of Safari 2 for web developer testing
While I don’t see this as a likely possibility, there is always an edge case that we’ll need to support Safari 2 for the short-term. This option would allow developers to test their code in Safari 2 and 3 from the same machine.
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Apple freezes Tiger users at Safari 2, Leopards users at Safari 3
Obviously, this possibility would be pretty dire to web developers, as there currently isn’t any way of running both versions on one machine, nor is there virtualization of OS X in an instance of OS X. Developers would need multiple Macs in order to properly test in Safari 2 & 3, or pick the version that has the most market share and forego the other.
I’m fairly confident Apple isn’t careless enough to go with option #3, and it seems counterintuitive to their business strategy to leave some users on Safari 2 and some on Safari 3, although, they do employ this business model to iPods—to force obsolescence. In the browser game it just doesn’t feel like a smart move. If I were a betting man, I’d say they’ll send through a Safari 3 Software Update for Tiger users on the day that Leopard ships.
Does anyone else have a prediction on how they’ll handle this? Drop ‘em in the comments.
I’ve been assuming Safari 3 will be available to Tiger & Leopard users, in the same way that the beta version is. Safari 3 is a much improved browser in many ways. Tabs alone, bring it lightyears ahead of Safari 2.
I’d hope so, as well… but it’s got to come down via Software Update or else you’ll have a large amount of the public who won’t actively install it. Additionally, I hope that they release the software update on Oct 26th, with Leopard so there is little over lapse of Safari 2 and Safari 3 in the wild.