Testing in Safari without a Mac
Simon Willison points out that Testing in Safari without a Mac is possible. I like his suggestion about using Knoppix (a live Linux distro on CD) as it contains the newest version of Konqueror which uses the same KHTML rendering engine that Safari uses. As Simon says, it’s not perfect, but it’s close.
PearPC is slow, but for me it became the best x86 choice for website testing on Safari.
PearPC is great, but it does “require” that you have a “paid” license for OSX. Knoppix is free and requires no configuation so may be a better choice.
I notice that this post appears high on Google for the search “x86 safari”, so I thought I’d mention that there is an increasingly big difference between Konqueror’s KHTML and Safari’s WebKit. There are many feature differences in basic areas that are supported uniformly in other browsers, which can lead to some nasty surprises. For example, Konqueror correctly supports clientX and clientY on mouse events, but Safari gives you values relative to the page rather than the viewport. I’ve run into other big differences lately as well.
I maintain a standards support resource and am currently collecting information for Safari and Konqueror, and I have already seen many differences. This should help for those who have trouble getting access to the real Safari.
It’s possible to use the leaked (not exactly legal) tiger-x86 in the free (and legal) VMWare Player. If set up right, Safari will have full Internet access, although the system is fairly slow. I haven’t tried PearPC myself.
A good idea is to use VMWare with a pre-packaged distro setup to integrate into the host OS.
I use Win XP and SUSE on VMWare
This one is very nice though:
MultiBrowser Appliance
http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/335