Safari for Windows Downloaded Over 1 Million Times 439
ClaraBow writes "Apple reports that it took Apple just two days to reach 1 million downloads of its newest Safari Web browser for Windows. If these downloads manifested into regular Safari users, then we just might have a third major browser on the Windows platform. If Safari can obtain a 10% market share on Windows, then it would further weaken IE's position and give standards-based browsers more leverage with developers."
I believe it (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm really glad that apple released this, and I hope it does well at establishing a good sized customer base. Competition is _always_ good, even if it draws market share from firefox.
Re:Competition (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't cry any tears over a little loss of marketshare for Firefox. Let's rejoice the fact that the marketshare of standards-compliant browsers goes up. THAT's why it is important to eat away at IE's marketshare.
Bert
For how long...? (Score:3, Interesting)
It may be even better than that. (Score:5, Interesting)
The reason why this is such great news is that this could possibly make WebKit, one of the most standard compliant engines out there, the number one option after IE (alongside with Gecko), which will hopefully prompt Web developers to, at last, respect the standards as the basics for any Web development.
Apples extra spice ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Think about it. People with technical insight choose FF/Opera over IE because it offers them features that IE doesn't have. People without technical insight just don't care about these features - they don't use plug-ins, skins, or strange shortcut keys.
If I were to convince "regular non-technical users" like my mother, aunt, neighbour, etc. to switch to a non-IE browser, I would need something that appealed to them. Fancy plug-ins ad strange/smart hotkeys is not what they are looking for - they want a sleek, graphically appealing and (for them) intuitive user experience.
Apple is in the business of delivering that EXACT experience! Not too many fancy settings and details, just the sleek and appealing interface that common people understand.
If Apple play their cards right, they could be a serious challenge.
Personally I'll stick with FF (on all 3 platforms I use) but I can certainly understand why the less technical "common users" would fall for the "Apple experience". They are really good at adding that extra GUI spice
Re:Competition (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Oh come on (Score:2, Interesting)
The only reason anyone is taking Safari seriously is because Apple is behind it. If this were just another open source project, people would have just laughed at it and forgot about it.
Even though Apple is behind it, I don't think it's a serious contender. It lacks the majority of the features which caused IE users to switch to Firefox in the first place. Why on Earth would they want to use Safari? Heck, Safari isn't even the best browser on the Mac. When I'm using a Mac, I find Camino to be a far more capable browser.
It will be nice for web developers who only have Windows boxes, and that's probably the true target user base of Safari on Windows when you think about it. I doubt Apple really thinks Safari is going to take Windows by storm. In fact, the release of the flaky beta builds (which aren't even of beta quality) should be enough proof of that. Apple is about perfection and everything working the first time, with the Safari builds I've seen so far, it's nowhere near that. I personally know of people who have had issues even getting it installed on their systems. So the articles pointing out the problems Safari on Windows has are really telling it straight. If Apple were serious about Safari on Windows, it would have just worked. That's what Apple is all about.
Re:Competition (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It may be even better than that. (Score:2, Interesting)
You don't think that developers would like to be able to develop against concrete standards today? We have to develop where the users are. And if the users are on IE, as unfortunate as it is, we have to develop there.
In a perfect world I'd prefer everyone was on Firefox, but that's just my pref. If I could count on a critical mass having XUL and SVG, etc, it would free my hand up considerably. But when it really comes down to it, standards compliance isn't keeping me up at night. Any good JS framework is abstracting away the issue of browser compatibility.
And while I might get flamed for saying this, I don't really care: If all this compliaince BS was actually to HELP developers, the OSS community would've adopted IE settings as the standard. I mean, why not? We can, in theory, set any standard we want. If FireFox used IE as the standard, and rendered like IE, BAM, we have easy web development and standard compliance. Unfortunately this is more about being adversarial. In some ways, I think, you have those in MSFT saying "We have 80% mindshare. *WE* are the standard" and you have those in other camps looking derisively at IE for being the Goliath that has a tendency to paint everything with a heavy brush.
Re:Competition (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I downloaded it... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Excellent news :-) (Score:2, Interesting)
- It uses its own font-smoothing, so text in Safari under Windows looks different to every other application.
- It doesn't seem to have access to Windows fonts for some reason.
- If you have your taskbar set to auto-hide, you cannot access it whilst using Safari in full-screen mode
These are just a couple of points from my brief testing at work yesterday. I just thought Apple would have taken a leaf out of their own design guidelines when building an application for other OSs. I can understand Aqua, but the other points are a little strange.Why? Safari is just an SDK! (Score:3, Interesting)
Either its a browser or its an SDK. It doesn't change its role based on whether the news is good or bad.
Re:Excellent news :-) (Score:1, Interesting)
But if they ever put a browser with Quicktimes/iTunes, my disdain for Apple software would turn to hatred.
Re:Competition (Score:3, Interesting)
Firefox has a marketing engine, I wouldn't exactly call it huge. I don't think you could compare even a daily full page NY times ad to even one national television commercial. More importantly, Apple has itunes/quicktime. When safari is installed by default with itunes (and based on Apple's past history it will be) every teen in the US is going to install Safari on their computer. Usually that computer is also mom and dad's computer.
It may not be quite as good as being default on the desktop but it sure beats banner ads and newspaper articles. It will also penetrate the clueless user market. They probably won't even know anything changed.
Re:It may be even better than that. (Score:5, Interesting)
1) De-facto standards, where a given arbitrary product is the reference, and codified standards, as described for open implementation, are VASTLY different things. Can you tell why? (Here's a hint: the answer contains the words 'lock-in'. I'll let you ponder that while ruing the lack of Firefox and XUL user base.)
2) However, reference implementations are a good thing, because they, as you rightly point out, help developers. Not providing a reference implementation of CSS is possibly the biggest mistake the W3C made.
3) In a perfect world, you'd be using just whatever the hell you want and it would make no matter. Gecko lock-in is not much better than IE lock-in. (Case in point: browse the commit logs of other browsers and count how many entries there are that go, "Emulate Firefox bug such-and-such so as to display somesite.com correctly". Seriously.)
And lastly,
4) I am slightly annoyed that you seem to assume I don't know about Web development. Because, meanwhile, in the real world, our issue tracking system is littered with tickets that read something like:
"Dear Mr. Important-customer-at-huge-company,
The issue you report looks like a bug in Internet Explorer. We'll allocate developer ressources to implement a work around for the next revision of the product. Kind regards, etc..."
This costs money. This costs resources that could be allocated to building better mousetraps, to make awesome shit, to create stuff to be proud of and to drive things ahead. Instead... Working in this field today is trying to build castles on swamps, and it's a daily struggle to not cave in and just sell shaky wooden shacks (painted cheap gold as per marketing's instructions) like the rest of 'em.
And this is not something I can do anything about.
However, you can.
Will you, in all consciousness, make the choice to be part of the problem? That choice is yours and yours only.
People will download anything (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm always amazed at what people will download. I used to have a plug-in for Softimage|3D, the high-end animation system, on my web site. To download it, you even had to fill out a form. Yet thousands of people downloaded it, more than could possibly use it for anything. Even after I added large type warnings that you must have Softimage|3D to use this thing, there were still people downloading it. Even after Softimage|3D was discontinued.
Re:Apples extra spice ... (Score:2, Interesting)
I am part of a research group, and as insane as this must sound to you, I am a member of more than one.
Also as shocking as this might sound, not all my participation in certain research groups is for profit, as they are not my main source of work or income. You see, I also own a few companies and yes we have software development teams as well as marketing and graphics departments.
(Don't be shocked, but not everyone that reads SlashDot lives in their parent's basement.)
As for things I say, some are opinions, some are based on research data, and some are based on my work experience or current projects I am dealing with in the industry. However I am paid well for my opinions, research and consulting knowledge; so I don't take offense to you trying to dismiss my comments just because opinion could be a piece of the amalgamation of facts, research, and personal experience.
Besides, Einstein wasn't offended by such dismissals either when he used personal insight along with research.
Re:It makes me wonder... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It may be even better than that. (Score:3, Interesting)
My company only officially supports IE and yet there are rendering issues, CSS bugs, and scripting errors between IE versions. Even worse behavior varies on the same version of IE on different versions of windows (IE6.0.2900 handles asynchronous background scripts differently on XP and 2k, it also handles POST and GETs differently in the background leading to some bizarre delays and rendering differences on certain combinations of browser and OS).
As a result we need to have more testers and test the same app on multiple machines as the behavior differs. And since most of the differences are rendering and behavior we can not automate the tests as the pages are usually still functional -- it means we essentially need 4 testers or 4 times as much time to do testing on different platform and versions all repeating the same tests. That is an awful waste of resources!
A standard would mean that I could at least expect IE on 2k to act the same as on XP. And if it didn't I could report it as a bug. Frankly we are migrating to Firefox just because the dev tools are better and behavior is more consistent. We will still need to test on IE, but the existence of some nice debugging tools and unit testing plug ins for Firefox means that it is just getting better to develop on Firefox with basic automated testing then have testers check it on IE for various visual bugs and quirks.
On a last humorous note - this chart of web development time is oddly accurate - http://blog.alsacreations.com/images/camembert.pn
Re:It may be even better than that. (Score:2, Interesting)
If that's redefined as the standard then it's not broken, is it?
Besides, MS's model makes more sense anyway. If, as a designer, I want a 300px-wide box, why can't I say so? The box is 300px, AND then... let's see... let's give it a 1px border and 10px inside padding. One 300px-wide column, done.
With flakey standards, I may WANT a 300px-wide box. But I have to then subtract the borders, then subtract the margins, then write 278px. Look at it, decide to change the padding or border width, and I have to do the math again. Dumb.
I thought that's why we had computers in the first place.
Re:No, free software does not do that. (Score:3, Interesting)
Because you are using mainstream software supported by your distro provider. Which they have to do because if they didn't, stuff would keep breaking. Distros exists largely to deal with this very problem! The fact that they manage to work around the problem in a large number of cases doesn't mean there isn't an underlying problem being worked around.
Re:Excellent news :-) (Score:3, Interesting)
> I have no intention of using it as my primary browser.
> Firefox.
The thing is, Apple doesn't really want you to use Safari. Neither does Google. They are really happy with you as you are because you are already using a standards-based browser. You are a good Web citizen. You are easy to author for, easy to serve in the future.
However there are many people using Explorer because it came with their PC and they don't know any better. Getting those people to just try either Safari or Firefox is important because it costs so much money to develop for Explorer because of its extremely low quality. We are all doing the least common denominator stuff in the same way that ISO 9600 CD's have 8.3 file names so that they can be compatible with "everything".
> Other things like extensions also keep me using Firefox over Safari.
Absolutely. The lack of extensions in Safari is a feature. If you like extensions, use Firefox.
As long as you don't use Explorer that is bad for everyone.
Re:Competition (Score:3, Interesting)
Consumers are going to get Safari for Windows free with their iPod and iPhone, just like they get Explorer free with their PC.
- 100 million iPod users
- 300 million iTunes for Windows users
- 400 million QuickTime for Windows users
Re:It may be even better than that. (Score:3, Interesting)
Sorry for the confusion, but I think there were enough hints there that you could have read for comprehension. Bt if you can't do the substitution in your head:
"With flakey standards, I may WANT a 300px-wide box. But I have to then subtract the borders, then subtract the PADDING, then write 278px. Look at it, decide to change the PADDING or border width, and I have to do the math again. Dumb."
Or try logically giving something a width of 100% so it fills the page, add 20px of padding INSIDE the container, and see what happens in a "standards" compliant browser. Whoops! We're now wider than the page! Dumb.
Padding is INISDE the container. As such, it should be INSIDE the 300px width, and not added on to it. Sorry, but they missed the boat on that one. Same with float clearing.
And as far as that goes, having absolute positioning automatically take its container out of the document flow and encompassing containers is stupid too. How many layouts with footers would have been a snap to do had it not been for that foul-up?
The standards "bodies" are just that. Bodies. People. Who make dumb mistakes. Or who promote agendas of their own choosing. I can just see it now:
"Fred, you can't do it that way. It screws up layouts."
Tom sniffs, his nose raised in distain. "Sorry Tom, but people shouldn't be using CSS for layouts anyway. The page should be pure."
Re:Safari's fonts, color space support (Score:3, Interesting)
In other words, publishing production standards instead of PC production standards.
This will be especially important when we have 300 dpi displays, because at that point, all of the "screen" based media becomes obsolete and the screen becomes just another print medium. We will show things in inches/cm and the computer will use as many pixels as it can. That is the whole idea behind the PDF-based graphics in Mac OS X, it's already a print medium just waiting to grow up.
Microsoft seems to have missed the memo. They're still relying on Verdana's squareness to hide their font rendering flaws. Any Adobe app has better font rendering than Windows.
Re:Excellent news :-) (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It may be even better than that. (Score:2, Interesting)
Why would anyone not want to apply the same styling rules to every paragraph in a document? CSS reduces duplication of formatting code (a nice side-effect of seperating content and presentation), but does not offer many ways to reduce duplication in the rules needed to do so. In most designs you will define a set of colors, border widths, etc. and apply them to more than one element, so it would be quite straightforward for a styling standard to define them centrally and make them reusable later in the same file and, thus, easier to change. It's the same thing on a different level. If you have a template system, you don't *really* need CSS in the first place, just define a variable with a bunch of font attributes and the like and insert them into every <p> you're outputting.