Just Widgets Blog

Many have already speculated on the reasons why Apple released Safari for Windows, the most obvious purpose being for iPhone compatibility testing, so the only thing I’ll add is that Safari has one obscure feature which IE, Firefox, and Opera don’t offer and probably never will. Native TIFF support. The Tagged Image File Format is an old format but it still sees use, especially in document imaging. Where I used to work, they handle thousands of claims for corporate bankruptcies and the document scanners would output multi-page TIFFs. The U.S. Patent Office’s (USPTO) documents are also in TIFF format as required by international standards (various reasons prevent them from also providing a browser-friendly format). Unfortunately, at least with Safari 3.0.1 on Windows, the USPTO images (like this one) appear too large, with multiple scrollbars. I’m unsure if the USPTO or Safari is to blame:

If you’re only going to view one or two patents, this awkward display is at least better than how patents appear with IE and Firefox - the don’t appear at all and you have to go install a TIFF viewer plug-in. Actually, there’s a work around for all this - use Google Patent Search instead. The folks at Google have converted all the patent images to PNG format, which all browsers support, and Google even offers a PDF for download too:

(Update, 2007-06-25: Edited this entry for clarity and added explanation that a TIFF plug-in is required for IE and Firefox)
(Update, 2007-07-18: I discovered a long running enhancement request to get native TIFF support into Mozilla Firefox (bugzilla#160261). There are several sites listed there which use TIFFs and it’s even suggested that IE 5.5 supported TIFFs (!? - maybe it was really a plugin that did?). If you sign up for a free account there, at bugzilla.mozilla.org, you can then vote to get the feature implemented.)