The point of Safari is developement first off. The second if say 5% of Windows users convert, this also helps in making sure web developers optimize their code for the browser as well. There is no need to WIN, but to improve web standards. We now have 3 browsers that are pushing standards (Firefox, Opera, Safari), This is good overall for the bigger picture beyond, just Safari and Windows vs Mac fights. Developers need to never forget the web is and always should be an open platform.

Safari for Windows has adopted many Windows conventions:

The menu bar is attached to the browser window, not the top of the screen.

The shrink, expand and close buttons at the top-right of the window work as expected.

Clicking the "X" button at the top-right of the window closes the application, not just the window.

Seems like Apple adopted many Windows conventions for this new browser.

I have downloaded Safari on both of the PC's that I use at work. In my 48 hours of use I have not had a single crash although occasionally clicking on a link will not open the page. I do agree that the file menus and the menubar bookmarks are hard to read against the dark gray background. The text antialiasing does not bother me but I am used to it from using my Mac for so long.

As far as this analyst's opinon, I disagree that Apple intends to "win" the browser wars by releasing Safari. I think that if Apple can just get another 5-15% of the browser market that they will consider that a big victory. The increase in Safari use will mean more compatability with more of the major websites, which will accomplish Apple's goals nicely.

"Apple will need to do things the Windows way or get eaten alive."

Moron. Besides the obvious (for the iPhone) let's look at all of the people who PREFER the way the Mac does things and are FORCED to use crappy Windows at work, now at least get a little more Apple with their Windows. Or put another way, a glass of ice water during their stay in h***.

"Apple was chastised harshly by bloggers and other vocal Windows users."

Who effin cares??? Like it's a shock that Windows biggots were going to cr*p all over Apple no matter what they produced.

The grumblings about Safari's keyboard commands not mapping to standard Windows commands is a moot point for a vast majority of users who are "point and clickers." I agree about the font rendering concerns, however. I also think that the simplicity of the browser is a plus. Many users don't want to spend time customizing their browser with plugins and skins, etc. They just want to browse, and the best feature is loading pages fast. Safari appears to be well suited to these needs.

sgirard,

Of course it is behaving as a Windows application. It IS a Windows application. Apple is simply adhering to Windows "standards" here. How would a PC user like it if the entire experience was not the way they are used to doing things? Should Safari for Win have all of its menu items in a place no other Windows application does?

exca1ibator hit the nail on the head. Getting 3-5% market share in Windows is actually a win for Apple. It will double Safari's presense on the web and perhaps more web sites will actually work properly once they get coded correctly.

Who says there is a fight, and who says anything about Apple winning?

All Apple needs to do here is to help Firefox keep the % of IE usage on the internet in check so that open web standards are more likely to be adhered to in the long term.

This should help keep competition alive, and compatibility problems to a minimum. This was a good move on Apple's part. It should help to keep an internet monopoly from forming, which was dangerously close to happening before Firefox came out.

The tech community and end users everywhere should be very happy about this, even if they don't choose to use Safari themselves.

I echo other peoples thoughts, when I say Mike Elgan doesn't get it. When you want to sell on-line music, you sell on iTunes, or give up the majority of the market. Apple is just positioning the iPhone for iPod style dominance. It requires a Windows footprint. If you want to write a distributed web app, then you write one that works on Windows, Mac and iPhone. It's a gamble, but if iPhone has that type of dominance, then you almost have no choice but to embrace Safari as a platform, because it is the only one that runs on all 3, and you cannot leave iPhone out as a platform, if it is the device people are actually carrying around... In the sub category of computers, Apple is going to go for a virtual monopoloy... I'm not making any guarantees, but that is the strategy. Apple doesn't care about browser share overall....they don't sell browsers.

This is such a non-story it's amazing there is this much commentary.

BETA

A "huge gamble" would be staking Apple's long term success on release of a Beta browser. I don't see that happening.

"the windows way" would appear to be the release of software with boatloads of security holes needing daily patches continuously. How did Apple go wrong with Safari Beta for Windows? ;)

If all of the Mac users who are stuck on Winblows machines at work switch to Safari that will have a negative impact on IE. As a developer of websites it totally frustrates me that lame web developers ONLY cater to IE folks. IF that number drops significantly then guess what? We get more sites that will be more compatible with the Mac. So to look at it a different way, Apple is doing Mac users a HUGE favor and pushing web designers to stop being Windows snobs and crank out TRUE platform independent and compatible sites.

'in the subcategory of computers' = 'in this subcategory of computers' ...good grief, hilarious typo.

These naysayers have no clue as to Apple's viral invasion of the Windows world. Apple is a wake-up call to all those people. Good products and good service. And future customers. Who cares what platform.

What exactly is the gamble? Releasing a free browser, guess what... if nobody used it, so... how is releasing it a gamble?

Giving users any choice other than ultra-lame IE is better.

Apple doesn't need to win. They just need to show up. As for the flaws, what do you expect in a product that is (a) 1.0 despite it's name, and (b) a beta, for God's sake? The product will improve. And contrary to the assertions being made, Apple does not have a "huge" investment in this. I suspect their investment is actually rather small, relatively speaking.

They guy says Safari's text is blurry, so I fired up Safari alongside FF & IE (in XP Pro) and had a look myself. You know what? He's right. Safari really IS blurry. In fact, it is SO blurry that the text no longer looks like it was printed on an old dot matrix printer, like it does on IE & FF. I can't believe anyone with 20/20 vision can look at all three windows and truthfully say that Safari isn't the easiest to read. To me it is far and away the easiest to read. The text in IE & FF have the jaggies so badly (compared to Safari) that it looks similar to a bad fax.

Whatever the guy is smokin, he's puffing so hard the smoke is clouding his vision.

And as far as Apple doing things the Windows way or get eaten alive ... I think it's going to be IE that will get eaten, from the inside out. Like that little wasp that lays her egg inside the body of its hapless victim. As Windows users get a taste of Apple's way of doing things many will soon discover that what they've been used to all these years is not necessarily good quality stuff.

My personal opinion is that cross platform applications and software are better in general than their competitors. That's not to say that there's not some great speciality software out there, just that for common applications, the best ones run both on the Mac/PC and sometimes Linux like Mozilla. I use to complain about sites not supporting Safari, but then I realized that Apple doesn't really support Quicktime/iTunes on Linux, so hopefully that will be next. Btw, Safari 3 on Tiger is a very nice improvement. Safari/Firefox use to slow down when I had 10+ tabs and autoloading AJAX/JS/? sites and now the beta seems to have solved all that.

LOVE IT. This is great. I'm still peeling back the folds to find out all it can do. I was skeptical that rendering speed could be a feature, but I've been sold. It's snappy, and I like it.

I like it. It brings a bit of Sanity to my forced window's usage. I have had very little issues with the beta version of Safari on Windows. And to those that can't stand the "bluriness" of the fonts or that all the fonts are bold? That tell me you are very used to looking at c***. Everything looks smooth, not blury. One extremely positive item that I noticed in Safari was how well it scaled images in the browser. They don't look out of place like they do on Firefox and IE.

"... that once Safari hit Mac OS X, Redmond waved the white flag and simply dropped development of IE Mac claiming there was no point in further development or distribution of the current or former versions. "

Mac IE was dumped before Safari was announced. Safari is probably here because IE hadn't been developed on for years at that moment.

Please remember that Microsoft at that time also dumped IE for Windows since they intended make IE on Vista even more integrated than it is.

They later reversed that decision.

Apple gets a cut of the ad money everytime a google search in Safari results in an ad hit. The more Safari Users the more potential ad revenue. Apple doesn't need to conquer the windows browser market to make money.

the more things apple in peoples faces on a daily basis the more street cred the brand has, for no reason than people know the name. It was already an intel compile so they just put in the windoze nav interface etc as they should and now lots of hands will touch it. They don't need to make dollar one on this and it will be an wild success, it already is, they haven't had to pay a penny and it is worldwide news, many will download it just to see and many will like and use it, if they don't it is still in their mind, the bugs aren't as bad as made out and now everyone will be waiting to see what will happen next, you have to hand it to Jobs and his media manipulation…

If Apple can get Safari usage up by selling millions of iPhones and making Safari available on Windows, maybe the lazy IE-only web developers for my bank's website will finally make it work on Safari. My favorite thing about Safari 3 is the inclusion of inline SVG. Any browser that pushes inline SVG in the marketplace is cool in my book. IE no longer has a built-in vector language in IE--the only way MS could figure out how to fix VML's security hole was to disable it altogether last year (oh, I guess there's WPF now--only in IE on machines with Vista, or XP with .NET 3.0 framework installed...how long before WPF gets killed due security holes?). Even if only 25% of the crowd is using Safari 3+, Firefox, Opera, and other SVG-capable browsers next year, there is finally some incentive to develop SVG into sites. There are some wicked things that can be done with inline SVG, JavaScript and XSLT that could never be done with any plug-in like Flash. If 75% of the audience is using Windows IE, then hey, they can look at static GIFs, and links to download browsers that give users a cooler experience.

so many good/clueful comments here. Also as someone who does web development, I f****** HATE developing for IE. You do your best to develop a site which is W3C-compliant... and then you are forced to mollycoddle IE browsers. Not only that, you have to make IE5.5 happy, IE6 happy, and now IE7 happy. Each have their quirks. Wouldn't be so much of an issue if so many people weren't using that piece of s*** browser.

Even if Microshit decided tomorrow to issue IE8 as a fully-compliant browser, it would be YEARS until you could forget about all the idiots still using previous, non-compliant versions of IE. After all, it wasn't all that long ago that developers still had to think about making happy the remaining Netscape browsers out there...

Anything that gets people away from Satan's own browser makes me happy.

Quote

"Elgan says: "...Safari uses Mac OS X font anti-aliasing instead of Windows' ...ClearType, ...fonts look blurry and all bold, all the time. Menus are hard to read. ...Apple will need to do things the Windows way or get eaten alive."

1. Point one - "(Apple's anti-aliasing of) fonts look blurry and all bold, all the time"

- Quite frankly, I have to strongly disagree. As a designer, I can appreciate the extra effort that the Mac OS (and it's browsers) put fourth in accurately rendering a font face. And, as a designer, nothing is more troubling than designing a web page with carefully selected font types and weights, only to have IE on the PC give a mangled-down interpretation of what I would call the "stick man" approach to font rendering. Personally, I use a quality LCD flat panel for my work and I find that the fonts look quite sharp and easy to read in Safari (as well as Firefox) on the Mac platform. I welcome that finally a company has come fourth with proper font rendering for the Windows side of things. Bravo Apple.

2. "Apple will need to do things the Windows way or get eaten alive"

- Perhaps a history lesson is in order. Apple has survived by not mimicking Microsoft. However, I would say that much of Microsoft's success has come by way of mimicking Apple.

Quote

"Elgan says: "...Safari uses Mac OS X font anti-aliasing instead of Windows' ...ClearType, ...fonts look blurry and all bold, all the time. Menus are hard to read. ...Apple will need to do things the Windows way or get eaten alive."

1. Point one - "(Apple's anti-aliasing of) fonts look blurry and all bold, all the time"

- Quite frankly, I have to strongly disagree. As a designer, I can appreciate the extra effort that the Mac OS (and it's browsers) put fourth in accurately rendering a font face. And, as a designer, nothing is more troubling than designing a web page with carefully selected font types and weights, only to have IE on the PC give a mangled-down interpretation of what I would call the "stick man" approach to font rendering. Personally, I use a quality LCD flat panel for my work and I find that the fonts look quite sharp and easy to read in Safari (as well as Firefox) on the Mac platform. I welcome that finally a company has come fourth with proper font rendering for the Windows side of things. Bravo Apple.

2. "Apple will need to do things the Windows way or get eaten alive"

- Perhaps a history lesson is in order. Apple has survived by not mimicking Microsoft. However, I would say that much of Microsoft's success has come by way of mimicking Apple.

What gamble is Apple taking, distribution of a FREE browser? It's FREE! And it's only one of several great alternatives for web browsers for windows. I just don't get what the huge deal here is. Is it perhaps the real reason Safari for windoze is getting so much attention is b/c it's Apple software for windoze #2; a treat? I use a PC at work, it's integrated with their intranet, it sucks, and I can't install software without the admins ok. I use my powerbook next to my windoze PC for everything I can use my mac for, I'm a competent user of both systems. Safari is a far better browser from a "user" perspective, but does not work well with some corporate specific web app I need for work. That speaks to windows dominance on the web, if Apple can make some inroads to web standards, thats ultimately good for Apple users; get it out of M$'s hands.

... and maybe for iPhone developers.

but the google apps on Mac/Win-Safari that's the whole point ;-)

hasta la vista billy!

I suspect most Mac people who have to use Windows at work will use Safari on Widows. I also suspect Apple will win some regular Window users. Safari is a nice browser for those of us who like things simple. Safari is that.

Moreover, people forget Apple makes money from Google when you do a Google search using Safari. Last I read Firefox makes about 40 million a year from Google. Since, Safari has a bit less then half the market share of Firefox, Apple is probably pulling in fifteen to twenty million a year from Google. If Apple doubles its market share, presumably it will double its money. That is a nice chunk of change for a small investment.

Moreover, I think Apple's real motivation is more to do with the iPhone. People using the iPhone may want to use the same browser on their computers as their iPhone. ATT has already said Google is already working on more applications for the iPhone.

When I first switched from PC to Mac it was a bit awkward getting used to the new shortcuts & interface. However, once I did I discovered it was far more usable than Windows (which seemed designed for point & click only). Apple should have their Windows version resemble the Mac version as much as possible, it is all about assimilation & getting them one step closer to owning a Mac.

I'm especially excited because of the level of attention this will get & what that could mean for Macs. Apple knows that to succeed in this market they have to build compatibility. If they want to really get Microsoft then anytime you get an error on a page because it was built for IE the browser should say, "This page did not display correctly because it was built for Internet Explorer ONLY". Maybe people would start to realize it isn't the browser that is the problem but the fact that the companies web developers are Microsoft sellouts!

hold onto this article for posterity and see what actually happens in 3 years_

Because aside from the article vaguely mentioning the fact that Safri is a Beta [for Windows] it fails to recognize that M$s own IE 7 does not have a hold on any market yet itself_ It has the advantage of name recognition for the the 1st place position in the market - but it is not IE 6 it does not act like IE 6 - and coding for IE 7 is different_

So give it time - and see how much of the market IE 7 scoops up - how much Firefox continues to build and what happens with Safari_

Honestly - I wish the MacBU would ressurect IE for Mac_ I really like the idea of open market competition_ They should have never gotten rid of it and Apple maybe should have unleashed Safari onto Winodws years ago_ Who knows_

critics should wait until after the Final Product is brought to Market_

If it's a mature market, why did it take MS so long to come up with a mature browser that can use tabs, which it probably one of my favorite features of any modern "mature" browser.

I use Windows at work too. For general surfing, I use Firefox on my PC. I only use IE for the web applications that I'm required to use at work that are only designed to work with IE.

One million d/ls in two days sounds like a win to me. Besides, it's a beta for Windows. Betas are released to test the features and gather user information. What's happening now is supposed to happen with new software. Feedback and criticism from users is a good thing at this point. That in itself is a win because somebody wants to use the browser and see it become successful, hence the feedback.

This is the same stuff people in the Windows world complained about when iTunes debuted. "It's not Windows-like so it won't succeed", "There are too many bugs, we just uncovered so many and we got hackers working on it", "they copied us". I suspect one day Apple will release iLife for Windows and there will be the same complaints. Honestly, what Windows application looks good out there or follows any standards? Even Apple used Brushed Metal, Aqua, Aluminum, and others but it didn't looked pieced together or like a mutant interface like Windows.

I agree Mr. Elgan pretty much misses the point. If anything the "win" premise of his argument was a poor choice of words. What about iTunes? Although I'm not a PC user, I've heard it's very popular. If so, then Apple has I suppose has had a "win" before.