Sounds obvious, but I never considered how important Safari is on Mac OS X (or having at least one Web browser) - especially since Mac OS X doesn't ship with any other Web browser.
Something happened to my father-in-law's iMac and Safari went missing. They're not sure if maybe they deleted it and emptied the trash or if the 10.4.10 update failed.
Regardless of how it happened - Safari was gone.
I tried, unsuccessfully, to
curl apple.com/safari to get the URL for their download page but I gave up after about 30 minutes of parsing HTML and redirects with my eyes.I was pretty stumped - I wanted to solve this problem right there on the spot without going home and downloading a DMG to a thumb drive.
As luck would have it, earlier that day, I had downloaded and installed both Safari 3.0b (public beta) and Firefox on one of my servers back home so I AFP'd into the servers and pulled the DMGs out of the trash.
So, I expected the story to end there after downloading both Web browsers. But, for some odd reason, only Firefox would install and run. Safari 3.0b installed couldn't be installed on the 10.4.10 volume. Well, at least having any Web browser is better than none - and Firefox isn't a bad one to have.
Once Firefox was installed I went to apple.com/safari and re-downloaded Safari 3.0b but it still wouldn't install. The installer simply said that Safari couldn't be installed on the Macintosh HD volume. So, I looked for Safari 2 to download. It seems that Apple not longer offers Safari 2.x as a download??? - only 2.x updates are available or the public beta of Safari 3.0.
Since my father-in-law was used to the Safari UI I downloaded Webkit and tried to install that. But, Webkit doesn't work without Safari. So, I manually copied the Safari 3.0b app onto my father-in-law's computer, via AFP, from my server. Although the Safari 3.0b app wouldn't run (it just bounced and then crashed with an undefined symbol error) it was enough to get Webkit up and running. Webkit was now working but not Safari - very odd.
I still wasn't satisfied so I manually downloaded System/Frameworks/WebKit.framework but that didn't fix the problem.
In the end, I remembered that I still had a server with Safari 2.04 and I manually copied that app to my father-in-law's computer and all seems to be working well.
Two questions come to mind:
Why couldn't I install Safari 3.0b on a 10.4.10 iMac?
Does Apple still offer Safari 2.x as a full download?
[digg this]
I'm looking for Safari 2 as well.
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