Did Hell Freeze Over Again?
And before I get flamed for that, I’m making a direct reference to one of Apple’s memorable announcements in days past, namely the time that iTunes was announced for Windows users. Mac fans around the world grumbled that their nice little music library application was being shared amongst the great unwashed but soon got over it. "They can have our iTunes, but they’ll never have our wonderful iLife apps or super-fast Safari".
Well, looks like we need to have another re-think.
So, one of the announcements at yesterdays WWDC conference in San Francisco was that Safari was going to be available for Windows users after all. The press release boasted that is is the "fastest browser running on Windows, based on the industry standard iBench tests, rendering web pages up to twice as fast as IE 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2". How reliable those claims are may be tested over the coming days.
But what does this mean to the world of web standards? The browser wars were played out a long time ago – does this mean that the ceasefire has been broken? Is it a new front being opened up or is it simply a minor skirmish that the rest of the world can turn a blind eye to?
I don’t have the answers – I was surprised as many people, blindly assuming that Safari would always and ever be a Mac-only piece of software – and I can’t claim to be massively excited about the prospect of using Safari on Windows. Or at least not until such a time as Firefox extensions, such as the indespensible Web Developer Toolbar, can be made to work in Safari but that’s like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. But that said, I think it’s a good thing:
- No more will testing for Safari be left until the last moment (or at all) – finally developers can check their work early on
- If it really is faster to render pages, that can only be good for the user
- Mac users will benefit too, as it will become more difficult to reject support problems on Safari with a simple "Ah but that’s just a certain percentage (Safari users) of an already small percantage of users (Mac users)"
So, what’s your take on this announcement? Exciting? Will it change the browsing landscape massively? Or are you just thinking "meh, whatever".
Posted: June 12th, 2007 under Apple, Tech.
Comments
Comment from Umair R.
Time June 29, 2007 at 5:15 am
re: Avinash, I agree with you about the extensions that are in Firefox
Comment from Avinash
Time June 13, 2007 at 8:38 pm
Since the moment I read the post titled “Safari now officially available for Windows” over at 456 Berea Street, I’ve been pretty happy because by releasing Safari 3 Beta for Windows family of operating systems, Apple has made my life a lot easier.
Now I’ve one more browser in my Web design tool box to test my designs. I installed the browser on my Win 2003 Server powered workstation and haven’t faced any trouble (except a minor problem with the uses of sIFR on my blog) even after visiting more than 1K blogs. I must be lucky because I found too many people who weren’t happy because of browser crashes and some font rendering bugs. I’m really impressed to see the stability of Safari in its beta stage.
But I don’t think that the availability of Safari on Windows is going to affect fat guys in the Web browser town (Firefox 2.0 and IE 7.0). And there is one more guy in this town called Opera. So, it already seems to be clear that Safari has miles to go if it wants to capture a good market share.
The major problem that is going to stop Safari from making people switch their current browsers is the huge lack of features. The first thing that comes to mind is the lack of support for extensions. After using Firefox for years, I feel like I suddenly went 6yrs back (when I first started using computers) if I’ve to surf the WWW with a browser that doesn’t support extensions.
It feels odd if I can’t use the holy Firebug and Web Developer extensions. It spoils my mood when I visit a blog and it throws a bucket full of advertisements on my face because of the lack of Adblock Plus extension. I agree that Safari renders pages faster than any other browser but without these extensions, I’m not going to use Safari to surf the Web. IMO, not only me, any Firefox user who uses StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, Web Developer, Firefox, Adblock Plus, Measure It and such other powerful extensions isn’t going to switch to Safari.
For now, I’ve decided to use Safari for doing nothing but reading blog articles and RSS feeds(because my eyes love anti-aliased texts!) and yep, for testing my designs.
BTW, I found too many people discussing about the release of Safari 3 Public Beta for Windows and its relation with iPhone. What do you have to say about iPhone and its relation with this release? :)
-A2.0