Safari On Windows? Why?
by Honda Wang • 06/14/2007
at 01:05 PM
With the announcement of Safari 3, the previously Mac-only web browser, for Windows and Mac, Apple has officially released its second foray into Windows software. It features tab organization, a new unified UI, speedier browsing, and that classic Aqua/Cocoa look for Windows XP and Vista. The big question here is: Why?
‘, ‘xhtml’, ‘With the announcement of Safari 3, the previously Mac-only web browser, for Windows and Mac, Apple has officially released its second foray into Windows software. It features tab organization, a new unified UI, speedier browsing, and that classic Aqua/Cocoa look for Windows XP and Vista. The big question here is: Why?
The obvious answer may seem to be that Apple just wants to expand its market share of Safari, but this decision just doesn’t seem to have any real business reasoning behind it. It seems as though this is just a mere gesture saying, “We can take down any Microsoft product, from Windows Media Player to Internet Explorer.” Aside from the “We’re better.” statement, Safari 3 doesn’t really offer anything new to web browsers on the Windows platform besides an purported speed gain.
“...over twice as fast as IE. What we’ve got here is the most innovative browser in the world, and the fastest browser on Windows. 1.6x faster than Firefox, twice as fast as IE, Google and Yahoo search built-in...”
- Steve Jobs
It made sense to expand iTunes to the PC, because that would mean way more iPods could be sold, and way more songs could be sold. But, with Safari, Apple isn’t going to sell any new Macs, iPods, or iPhones. Safari is just a free piece of software that doesn’t make any money at all. It just doesn’t make any business sense. The only victory Apple will get if Safari becomes popular is that warm fuzzy feeling of seeing the market share of a free web browser go up.
The point is that Safari won’t make people switch over to Macs. In fact, it makes it even less likely that people will switch over. One particular web designer on Digg commented that the release of Safari for Windows saved him money from buying a Mac in order to test his sites on Safari. Even if Safari is the “world’s best browser” according to Apple, being twice as fast as Internet Explorer, porting it to Windows only gives more reason for Windows users to stay with Windows. And for those who claim that the sexy eye-candy will have people switch over, if that was true, Mac market share would have been much higher by now.
What we all really have to think about is not whether Apple is going to release some fancy new hardware product, but why Apple is making all of this software for Windows. What can we expect in the future? Will Apple be porting professional applications like Final Cut Pro to Windows? What is the method behind all this madness?
Feel free to add your opinion at the Macteens forums.
Honda Wang is a teenager who hails from Iowa. He uses a black MacBook and can usually be found coding away or doing something else tech-related. If not, please contact the police about a missing person.
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I think that Safari was ported to Windows so windows user would have an application to test their iPhone Web 2.0 apps. Since the iPhone uses Safari if it works on the Mac/PC version it should work on the iPhone.
Okay, some of the characters are replaced with symbols which makes part of the article unreadable.
<a href="http://www.glennwolsey.com/2007/06/15/the-answer-to-why-safari-was-ported-to-windows/">I have your answer Honda.</a>
<a href="http://www.glennwolsey.com/2007/06/15/the-answer-to-why-safari-was-ported-to-windows/#comments">Here’s</a> your reason Honda.
- Google Revenue
- Better website and web application support
- iPhone “application” testing ground
I like the idea, it makes sense in most ways.
I think that Apple was trying to show Windows users what a Mac app looks like, and they used one of their flagship ones. I don’t see anything explicitly wrong with it. Microsoft makes tons of apps for Mac.
Webkit also is a very nice and lightweight standards-compliant rendering engine that has way less spaghetti code than Gecko (Mozilla) and is certainly many, many, many times better than Triton (IE).
Now, people on OS X, even, have grudges against Safari, and so I didn’t expect Windows users (let along Digg commenters, as they’re (almost) savages). I like Safari. It’s my browser of choice.
I’d rather have more people on Firefox and Safari than IE alone. The less IE there is, the better. Trust me.
Don’t expect an iLife or iWork on Windows, however, those are some of THE strong points for moving to a Mac. Safari is just a browser.
Oh please—how many people were planning to switch to the Mac because of Safari? None, except a few web devs who needed one to test. This will have no impact on people buying Macs—it just makes PC users more comfortable with Mac software, which in turn makes it easier for them to switch.
Gruber talks about the brilliance of this move in three points:
“--More Safari users means better support for Safari from web developers. The more popular Safari for Windows gets, the less likely it is that a big new web app is going to be released without first-class support for Safari on day one.
“--Safari for Windows makes it easier for Windows-based web developers to write web sites that are optimized for Safari on iPhone.
“--The “show them how nice Apple apps are and some of them will decide they should just switch to a Macâ€? effect.”
I am really glad Apple release Safari for Windows because now I can do cross-browser compatibility testing on Safari without buying a MAC. According to some <a href="http://www.techroam.com/safari-3-for-windows/">tests</a> it seems that its slower then Firefox.
Jack, you’re right. Apple probably mainly released Safari for Windows so developers could get started making “web apps” for the iPhone.
january 2008 macworld and dotmac, wait for it