As usual David Hyatt has the roundup on the changes for Safari 1.3. A must read blog post for all web developers.
My big question is how long will Mac OS X 10.3 be supported and receive Safari Upgrades? IMHO that’s the big problem. Microsoft at least makes most of it’s upgrades for all OS’s, so the majority of IE Users are 5.5 or 6.0 at this point. Firefox and Opera don’t really care you can update at any point. It’s hard for web developers to take advantage of these fixes if Mac OS 10.2 users still don’t have them. Not everyone upgraded (especially businesses) to 10.3. I know 2 of my systems aren’t upgraded because Panther feels slower on them. I doubt everyone is upgrading to Tiger. While nice, I don’t think average joe will see it worth the effort/price.
I ask Apple to help us out here. Make Safari so that it’s available for 10.2+ and supports 10.2+. All updates go to all Mac OS X versions. That way people upgrade and Safari becomes easier to support. I don’t want to support several versions of Safari. This makes Mac’s easier to support, and that’s good for everyone. Come on Apple.