Any front-end web developer can tell you the headaches involved in cross-browser web development. Years ago, we had to deal with incompatible DOMs and different implementations of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. In the modern Web, our work is much easier, but there are still discrepancies between the four major players:

• Internet Explorer
• Firefox
• Opera
• Safari

Before today, testing in all four browsers was cumbersome. Developers using a Windows machine had IE, Firefox, and Opera to develop for and test in, but finding a suitable test bed for Safari required developers to purchase a Mac. For me, this meant switching my second monitor between Windows and OS X via a KVM. But now, that’s all over... sorta.

At the WWDC, Apple announced a client for Windows and dubbed it Safari 3 beta. Of course, I downloaded and installed Safari the moment I heard it was available. Other than Swift, which has been dormant for a long while, Safari 3 is the only WebKit-based (or KHTML-based for that matter) browser with a Windows client. On Windows XP SP2, the user agent string is:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en) AppleWebKit/522.11.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Safari/522.11.3

My guess is that it will coincide with the Safari update in the upcoming OS X Leopard, which will certainly be nice. Unfortunately, the client lacks any error reporting. It may be something that we have to specifically enable (like on the Mac), but I haven’t found any information on it. So that means we can test, but not find and fix problems. Yay!