Web browsers are interesting things. Most people don’t even care which they use. If you have Windows, you use Internet Explorer. If you have a Mac, you use Safari. If you’re smart, you use Firefox. But the operating system barriers have been slowly breaking down. Internet Explorer can be installed on Mac OS, although the Mac version is outdated and fairly crappy. Now, however, you can install Safari, the formerly Mac-only browser, on Windows. Granted, it’s only a beta version (more like an alpha, as I’ll later explain), but you can still try it out if you so like.
Being the curious kind of guy I am, I downloaded Safari and installed it. I knew I wouldn’t keep it (I like Firefox too much), but I still wanted to see how well it worked. Well? Bottom line: it didn’t work. Well, it did. Kind of. Basically, when I started it up for the first time, a rather odd thing happened: there was no text. None at all. Not in the webpage I was looking at and not in the user interface of Safari itself. That means no menu bar, no title, nothing at all. Looked something like this:
A quick Google search turned up, surprisingly, nothing of use. So I headed to Apple’s support forums, where I came across a link to a solution for the missing text problem (actually more of a garbled text problem, which wasn’t what I had). The solution involved deleting two font files packaged with Safari, which might be interfering with the same font files in Windows itself. I got rid of the fonts and started up Safari again…only to see this:
I haven’t found a solution for this particular problem, but it really makes this beta look bad. I mean, I can understand minor bugs in beta software, but something this bad? Bad localization is something that belongs in software that’s not even ready for mass-testing. Safari isn’t a bad browser. I’ve used it on Macs, but this version on Windows…yeesh. Stick with Internet Explorer or Firefox. This version of Safari has a long way to go.
UPDATE: Well, I figured out why Safari wasn’t working. Turned out that the two fonts Safari needed–Lucida Grande and Lucida Grande Bold–weren’t actually installed on my system at all. For some reason, Safari wasn’t able to use the fonts it had in its program folder, so I had to copy the fonts to my Windows Fonts folder in order for everything to work. Here’s a quick tutorial on fixing Safari if you’re having this problem:
- Open up your Safari folder and find the Safari.resources folder. This is usually C:\Program Files\Safari\Safari.resources\
- Copy Lucida Grande.ttf and Lucida Grande Bold.ttf in that folder to your Fonts folder. That’s usually C:\Windows\Fonts\
- Delete the copies of the two font files from your Safari.resources folder.
- Start up Safari and you should see all the text correctly.
No clue why deleting the two fonts from Safari’s folder made it half work, and no clue why Apple wasn’t smart enough to make it work without any fiddling on my part (or on the part of hundreds of others with the problem, if the support forums are any judge). Note: if my little tutorial doesn’t work for you, be sure to leave a comment and I’ll try to help out.
Sphere: Related Content
Wow thanks for the fix :d I was having the same problem.
” If you’re smart, you use Firefox”
And if you’re smarter, you use Opera ;)
Not to sound rude, but in my opinion the huge FF banner at the top of your page is a little excessive for promoting a piece of software.
As for Safari and the text problem, I am surprised the program didn’t use another font, e.g. Arial/Verdana. Good job on solving it.
@Alex
The banner’s mostly meant for Internet Explorer users, since certain parts of my theme don’t quite work in IE. I wish there was some way to make it smaller or not show up on browsers like Opera…but oh well.
Also, apparently the whole text problem has been fixed in more recent versions of the Safari for Windows beta. I’m not sure what they did, though, but I’m not going to waste my time trying it out again.