Following yesterday's tech news was sweet!
First there was the announcement that Apple was releasing Safari browser for Windows claiming 'blazing performance' with 2x speed improvements in page loads and JavaScript executions. Within hours there were a number of bugs[1] [2] [3] reported on this beta release.
Firstly, I do not think '2x faster' is a big claim when the difference is in microseconds. Plus, the fine print says that the test was done on an iMac system running Windows XP. Now, what is the performance of the browser on a PC running Windows where it is most likely to be used? The bigger thing though which comes second, is how did Apple miss these bugs in its tests? It took others just hours to find them using publicly available software (like hamachi).
Among the other interesting things... here is one by Joel Splosky on the font rendering in Safari. He goes on to talk about the preference of people and makes a motherhood statement on the outcome of preference studies - "when you do preference surveys, you'll find that most people don't really know what to choose, and will opt for the one that seems most familiar. This goes for anything from silverware (people pick out the patterns that match the silverware they had growing up) to typefaces to graphic design: unless people are trained to know what to look for, they're going to pick the one that is most familiar". Hmm, I should check on the accuracy of this one.
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