06/15/2007, 12:10pm, EDT
Friday, June 15th
Windows Safari: A fight Apple can't win
While Apple has been able to dominate market spaces in which it controls the device from top to bottom (iPhone, iPod, the Macintosh), the company may be taking a huge gamble with Safari 3.0 for Windows by entering a market space where it is on a level playing field. A Mike Elgan piece opines that Apple has essentially picked a fight it cannot win, having "uncharacteristically entered a mature market not created or controlled by Apple." Noting that security experts published information about some 18 security holes found in the new browser, Elgan says that Apple was chastised harshly by bloggers and other vocal Windows users.
Apple did, however, quickly issue a 3.0.1 release that fixed many of the reported security vulnerabilities. It should also be noted that the browser is a beta, and flaws are to be expected. One point of criticism, however, likely will not change much before Safari 3 for Windows ships as a final product: the Mac-likeness of the browser. Elgan says: "Windows can only be resized from the bottom-right corner. Safari uses Mac OS X font anti-aliasing instead of Windows' built-in ClearType, and fonts look blurry and all bold, all the time. Menus are hard to read. Safari uses its own, unalterable, nonstandard key combinations for things like flipping through tabs. The list goes on and on. [...] on a browser, Apple will need to do things the Windows way or get eaten alive."
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Second, I think you have to define what "winning" means to Apple. Already they have a million downloads of Safari/Win. Is that a "win"? FireFox seems to think they're competitive, and they have, what? 11%?
All I know for sure is that Apple has a good reason for doing this... and that none of us has figured it out yet.
They have ZERO expectation of "competing" in the PC browser market. No interest and no expectation.
What they ARE doing is introducing iPhone users to the full-size version of THE BROWSER THEY WILL BE USING. The job of Safari on the PC is to remove yet another barrier to PC people switching to Mac. Hello.
If they could "win" that fight, who knows.
Calling any piece of software a mature market is a sign that this guy knows less than he thinks about software. The browser was "mature" with Netscape. Then it was "mature" with IE. It's now mature with four competing mainstream browsers (IE FF Opera Safari)?
MP3 apps was a mature market - WinAmp was the last word. Then came iTunes.
I do hope that Apple improves the browser on the Windows side. It's not like Apple to release a product that harms its reputation. Fit and finish are expected out of Curpentino.
Even if this is for developers, that's not how Apple portrayed it. If they wanted it to be just for developers they would have placed it behind the Apple Developers website, not sandblasting it on the Apple homepage: "The world's best browser. Now for Windows, too. Download free for Mac + PC."
Please bring the quality of this port up, folks.
I will also switch all of our terminal boxes to Safari by default once it is out of beta and has no major security threats.