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Apple's Safari 3.1 to support downloadable web fonts, more

appleinsider.com — The ability to download and immediately render non-standard web fonts is just one of several advancements Apple Inc. has planned for Safari 3.1, a small but significant update to its share-gaining web browser for both the Mac and Windows PCs. The release, which underwent private testing this week, will tie in a number of other enhancements, most of

Who dugg this? Made popular Feb 8, 2008

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  • wilkinnh, on 02/08/2008, -5/+76this is going to be cool until myspace pages ask you to download some variation of comic sans every time you visit their page
  • rebotfc, on 02/08/2008, -7/+60This is actually quite big news, Apple is really pushing the web browser envelope.
  • vibrokatana, on 02/08/2008, -3/+47If only we could get rid of Internet Explorer, I am getting ***** tired of hacking things so it shows up properly.
  • scepticus, on 02/08/2008, -3/+38I hope FF will follow.
  • dustinmacdonald, on 02/08/2008, -0/+30WebKit is always pushing the envelope. But forget web fonts, CSS animations are easily the biggest news. No more awful JavaScript…
  • timmerk15, on 02/08/2008, -0/+24Nokia and Google don't develop it, they just use it - along with Adobe. The khtml team and Apple are the main developers.
  • Ratty, on 02/08/2008, -7/+25It's not so much Apple as WebKit which is made up of a number of people other than Apple, including Nokia, Google and of course KDE.
  • homesqua, on 02/08/2008, -7/+23one more reason to hate IE's guts..
  • Smoozle, on 02/08/2008, -3/+19What exactly is nonstandard? I'm under the impression that all those cool things are part of HTML5.
  • superjunaid, on 02/08/2008, -2/+18Finally!! no more missing fonts on a website. Am I right?
  • InorganicMatter, on 02/08/2008, -3/+19Can't see THIS one being exploited...
  • polarbear66, on 02/08/2008, -1/+17As a designer, I must say: Firefox, IE8, you better take notice... This would make some excellent diversity in the manner of design. Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, Tahoma, Trebuchet, Georgia, ... there's only a handful - and we're all getting tired of them.

    *crosses fingers for multi-browser development of dynamically loaded web typefaces*
  • ilgaz, on 02/08/2008, -0/+14Earlier times, both IE and Netscape tried this and for some reason, they gave up. Of course this happened when everyone showed off with a new "invention" daily, browser wars were still up without any clear winner yet. So, lack of standards served it.
    Check this from '98 http://www.webdeveloper.com/html/html_dfonts_1.htm ...
    BTW, if it works this time, prepare to use a proxy to filter... Comic Sans MS!
  • BossKey, on 02/08/2008, -2/+16You mean like the features "Reopen Last Closed Window" and "Reopen All Windows From Last Session" commands in Safari 3? I've had to use them at times, and they work perfectly.

    And Digg comment threads expand far faster in Safari 3 than in Firefox.

    My usage time is split between using Safari and Firefox depending on the machine I'm on. I generally prefer Safari 3's performance and UI.
    Note that I am saying Safari 3. If you are still judging Safari by Safari 2...you need to do some new research.
  • seantubridy, on 02/08/2008, -5/+18"This page uses 274 fonts you don't have on your system. Would you like to download them now?"
  • Chirp08, on 02/08/2008, -2/+13This is only useful if everyone adopts it (IE, mozilla, opera, etc.). It needs to be made standard or it will be as useful as transparent PNG's are. Font's aren't small files, I hope they found a way to reduce the file size, having 2-3 fonts would be deadly on anything less then broadband (which means in this day and age no business could possibly use this, nobody can afford to ignore the needs of dialup quite yet in business)
  • RyeBrye, on 02/08/2008, -0/+10There's NO WAY it will install the font... talk about a font piracy nightmare...

    It's used just for that one website.
  • LeonardNimrod, on 02/08/2008, -0/+10Considering WebKit is under 4 years old, that is pretty good. They have more internet standards, include more CSS2 and HTML5 code than IE or Firefox. It's too bad that there are still so many lazy and/or short-sided web-developers who won't adopt these new, useful features.

    I'm glad Android choose WebKit and not Gecko or IE (haha).
  • Me1000, on 02/08/2008, -0/+10As do I, the new HTML 5 standard is amazing!
    too bad it will take MS another 4 years to implement it in IE!
  • Me1000, on 02/08/2008, -0/+9You would be right!
  • dvessel, on 02/08/2008, -0/+9How would it be any worse than all the lame graphics being downloaded already? Besides, I doubt anyone from myspace would know how to use it.
  • MikeSD34, on 02/08/2008, -1/+9It wasn't a standard when IE did it. They didn't bother defining one either, they just did add another feature in the fight against Netscape. Embrace and extend.
  • RockinRoel, on 02/08/2008, -0/+7The problem is: everything Microsoft does, is proprietary and Windows-only. Also, they sort of abandoned this kind of thing.
    Since WebKit is open source, and these are open standards, it's a 1000 times nicer.
  • monospaced, on 02/08/2008, -1/+8Individual fonts aren't as large as their typeface family, and still smaller than most images and banner ads. And if you aren't using broadband at this point in your business...well, you should be. Seriously.
    Are you that misinformed?
  • threepio, on 02/08/2008, -1/+8I wonder how this will affect Safari on the iPhone and on the iPod Touch.
  • corsairstw, on 02/08/2008, -0/+6They'll probably release another iPhone and iPod Touch update when they announce the SDK that includes Safari 3.1. Hopefully it will have better caching instead of reloading whenever you go back a page.
  • newbill123, on 02/08/2008, -1/+7C'mon, even if you don't use Safari, the fact that a major browser is embracing standards is a good thing. I expect there will be some teething pains with these when people try to implement them. But I expect Opera and Firefox to be following closely behind. As nice as standards are, someone has to lead the way in adopting them and even if you don't use that browser, it's good that the standards are coming to life.
  • timmerk15, on 02/08/2008, -1/+7The HTML5 SQL engine is big news, too. Goodbye Google Gears!
  • inactive, on 02/08/2008, -0/+6Nice, assuming it doesn't get abused. I can just picture some manager insisting you use10 different fonts on the company web site.

    Hopefully Mozilla will follow suit. Microsoft will likely say it's not important, then release it in the following version of IE, and then crap on about how important it is. Just like they did with the Acid Test.
  • nunofgs, on 02/08/2008, -1/+7Or spell correctly, apparently.
  • dgp1, on 02/08/2008, -2/+7...and NO ONE EVER USED the features then. I bet because Netscape and MS didn't do a very smart job of implementing it. Coupled with the fact that neither one of them did it in a way that would work with the "other guy's" browser. So hopefully WebKit will do it better.
  • Ireland, on 02/08/2008, -0/+5I'd rather download loads of text than a loads of images on webpages with non-standard font, think of the speed increase possibilities? This is where things are heading.
  • newbill123, on 02/08/2008, -0/+5I think it only downloads the characters needed. So if you put a headline with a single character from Apple Symbol, you'll get a character downloaded and not a complete Unicode character set. For most sites, even if they had a unique body font, it'd only require about 60 characters. I'm more worried about style than speed.
  • timmerk15, on 02/08/2008, -0/+5I don't know about normal consumers using Safari for Windows, but many web developers use it to test their sites in Safari when they don't have access to a Mac.
  • LeonardNimrod, on 02/08/2008, -1/+6It will just render as the closest thing or a default. There is no reason for any phone to have excessive variations of fonts.

    In fact, I expect a Preference button in Windows/Mac Safari 3.1 to prevent this from even being an option. Well, I hope so anyway.
  • timmerk15, on 02/08/2008, -1/+5No more then image exploits or anything else your web browser downloads. I'm sure there will be exploits, but what doesn't?
  • Karmavs, on 02/08/2008, -0/+4@EntropyFan
    not a final standard YET - but it is in the draft. w3c, historically has only finalised standards once they are mostly supported by the current browsers.

    (also, it's in CSS 3, not HTML 5)
  • KibibyteBrain, on 02/08/2008, -0/+4Of course we all know how CSS and the like were adapted so quickly. We all know that there are no sites on the web that have standards compatibility issues!
  • Me1000, on 02/08/2008, -0/+4=)
  • Karmavs, on 02/08/2008, -0/+4Truetype is cross-platform too…
  • MikeSD34, on 02/08/2008, -0/+4WebKit may be 4 years old, but KHTML, which WebKit is based on is 10. They laid the foundations for this a long time ago and deserve a fair bit of credit as well.
  • RockinRoel, on 02/08/2008, -0/+3Is Javascript that awful? I think it rocks! Of course, with the right framework, like mootools or prototype. I'm more of a programmer than a designer though.
  • brownspank, on 02/08/2008, -0/+3His point about transparent PNGs is that it's not _supported_ by all major browsers (namely, IE 5.x & 6). If it were standard, you wouldn't have to resort to hacks and enablers (like JS) for your PNGs to display correctly.
  • l0ne, on 02/08/2008, -0/+3Re: fonts. This is better than MS's as you can embed .otf and .ttf fonts without having to convert them to a half-assed format; also, there are now a lot of fonts under the GPL or similar licenses (ie Liberation). dafont.com has a very clear "GPL/Public Domain" mark on them.

    CSS Animation **ROCKS**. It's like Cocoa's Core Animation, except for the web. w00t!


  • RockinRoel, on 02/08/2008, -0/+3Also, Opera already supports this.
  • RockinRoel, on 02/08/2008, -0/+3LeonardNimrod, I'm sure that designers who know what they're doing will accomplish a nice result. Those who don't know what they're doing never accomplish nice results, that isn't going to change. Downloading fonts is much nicer than having to download loads of prerendered images, pages will load faster, and they won't actually be installed on the iPhone anyway.
  • northernmunky, on 02/08/2008, -0/+3it does... and its rising
    http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid= ...
  • MackPrime, on 02/08/2008, -0/+3and you can flip through them like album covers
  • punkcat, on 02/08/2008, -0/+3agreed, its all very cool but honest web developers can't rely on it until everyone is on the same standard.
  • RockinRoel, on 02/08/2008, -0/+3The Microsoft implementation sucks. I tried to use it. Also, it was completely proprietary, "only for IE". Also, I think font pirating won't really be an issue. The fonts probably wouldn't be downloadable or something. I don't know, just check out the latest WebKit build to see how they do it.
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