Apple Picking a Fight it Can't Win With Safari

Ian Lamont writes "Mike Elgan has an analysis of Apple's successes and concludes that the release of the Safari browser for Windows not only goes against the Apple success formula, but is doomed to a vicious failure: 'The insular Apple universe is a relatively gentle place, an Athenian utopia where Apple's occasional missteps are forgiven, all partake of the many blessings of citizenship, and everyone feels like they're part of an Apple-created golden age of lofty ideas and superior design. But the Windows world isn't like that. It's a cold, unforgiving place where nothing is sacred, users turn like rabid wolves on any company that makes even the smallest error, and no prisoners are taken. Especially the Windows browser market. ... While security nerds were ripping Apple for a buggy beta, the UI enthusiasts started going after Apple for the look and feel. Here's a small sample. Apple can expect much more of this in the future. The problem? Safari for Windows just isn't Windows enough.' Elgan also expects that the Firefox faithful will fight the Safari influx — a theory that has been supported by comments from Mozilla executive John Lilly, who criticized Steve Jobs' 'blurry view of real world' just after Jobs announced Safari for Windows."

It's all about iPhone

[herman0221]

Apple didn't release Safari for Windows to compete - it was released so that people can develop their Web 2.0 apps for iPhone...

Re:They're Not There to Win

[pyite]

Leo Laporte's rant on the latest Macbreak Weekly about how it's some new lock in for non-open standards was very disappointing.

That really bothered me. And he and Andy Ihnatko [cwob.com] kept going on and on about until Merlin Mann [43folders.com] was basically like "Um, do we have any reason to believe its proprietary?" (links added in case people don't know who they are). Leo's usually not like that, and it surprised me, a lot. I wonder what pushed him in that direction.

Re:Why can't people take it for what it is?

[Timesprout]

From Apple [apple.com]

Apple Introduces Safari for Windows Public Beta Available Today for Mac Windows

WWDC 2007, SAN FRANCISCOJune 11, 2007Apple® today introduced Safari 3, the worlds fastest and easiest-to-use web browser for Windows PCs and Macs. Safari 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. Safari joins iTunes® in delivering Apples legendary user experience to both Windows and Mac® users as well as full support of open Internet standards. Safari 3 features easy-to-manage bookmarks, effortless browsing with easy-to-organize tabs and a built-in RSS reader to quickly scan the latest news and information. Safari 3 public beta is available today as a free download at www.apple.com/safari.

We think Windows users are going to be really impressed when they see how fast and intuitive web browsing can be with Safari, said Steve Jobs, Apples CEO. Hundreds of millions of Windows users already use iTunes, and we look forward to turning them on to Safaris superior browsing experience too.

I think you have a bit of revisionism going on there after a poorly received release.

Re:They're Not There to Win

[Simon Donkers]

Maybe when Steve Jobs showed a pie chart of the browsermarket and his vision in his presentation it was an indication of Apple's motivation.

John Lilly, Mozilla's chief operating officer, focused on the part of the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) keynote where Jobs spelled out existing browser shares of Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari -- 78%, 15% and 2%, respectively -- before displaying another pie chart that showed Safari with about a quarter of the market, IE with the remainder.

From Computer World [computerworld.com].

So Steve wants to claim 25% marketshare in the browsermarket and kill Firefox, Opera and the rest in the process. When they release a version that will work for me I'll be happy as that means I can test websites for compatibility without having to buy a Mac. However if they are trying to gain a 25% marketshare they have a very long way to go and I very much doubt they can squash Firefox out of the picture so easily.

Re:Not really news, not really unique to Windows

[TRRosen]

Of course Apple will keep up with the updates for safari for windows. it has for years! The thing most people forget is that 90% of Safari had already been ported to windows. Safaris rendering is done with webkit(based on Konqueror). This was ported to windows long ago to support the ITMS portion of iTunes.(All rendered in webkit).

People use IE because its there. but look what Apples doing...bundling Quicktime/iTunes/Safari in one download. a whole lot of people are going to have Safari..there already...because they downloaded it with iTunes. hmmmm Using your dominace in one market to enter another....thanks for the tip Bill.

Re:Maybe it's the comfort factor

[pyite]

With the Intel Platform now standard for Mac, the transfer of Safari to Windows was far less work than it would have been in the beginning.

Not really. If you put CPU specific code in a browser, you should just shoot yourself and admit failure as a developer and/or software engineer. In addition, Safari's rendering comes from WebCore, which is a combination of KHTML (from the KDE folks) and KWQ (which Apple wrote as an adapter). KHTML was running on multiple platforms way before Apple decided to use it.

Re:And why does IE still hold about 80% of the mar

[Anonymous Coward]

The 90's called they want their statistics back.

2007 IE7 IE6 IE5 Fx Moz S O
May 19.2% 38.1% 1.5% 33.7% 1.3% 1.5% 1.6%

Re:They're Not There to Win

[Oktober Sunset]

A lot of windows users downloaded iTunes because they bundled it with Quicktime, and you had to find a tiny link the size of an ant's toothpick to get Quicktime on it's own. So all the poor chumps who just wanted to watch some .mov file had to download iTunes even tho they didn't want it.

Re:They're Not There to Win

[Dogtanian]

A lot of windows users downloaded iTunes because they bundled it with Quicktime

Even if you didn't install iTunes with Quicktime, the latter tries to get you to install iTunes whenever it notifies you of an upgrade anyway. (The window includes a ticked-by-default "install iTunes" option.)

Re:They're Not There to Win

[bodan]

I don't think it was meant to be funny. I see your point, many downloaded iTunes because of the iPod. But I myself downloaded at least half a dozen times iTunes by mistake, trying to download QuickTime. I was half-way through a hate-mail to Apple when I finally found the stand-alone download.

Re:They're Not There to Win

[pyite]

the more valuable investment of effort is in making the experience great for the vast majority.

Maybe. Let's face it, people who buy Macs typically have more money than the person who's buying a $400 PC at Wal-Mart. If your target is the more affluent web surfer, then making sure your site works in Safari is probably worth your time.

Slashdot FUD

[clearreality]

Your post may have been mainly humorous, but it bears a thoughtful response based on the moderation.

A quick review of the MP3 players currenty for sale at Amazon and Best Buy shows that every MP3 player except for the iPods plays WMA. Maybe "nobody cares," but WMA was pushed very hard as a candidate for the leading digital music standard. It would not be unreasonable to claim that the main reason it failed to become the de facto standard is because of Apple's iPod and iTunes Music Store. (Which use AAC, a codec definition which is a standard.)

Also, although the market share of the segment is small, WMA-based stores do sell a lot of digital music tracks. See http://www.sptimes.com/2006/10/30/Technology/Digit al_music_users_f.shtml [sptimes.com] for some music store market shares in 2006, giving WMA around 15%, MP3 around 10%, and iTunes (AAC) around 70%. (Yes, I know that a lot of digital music collections were converted from CD's in whatever format the user chose, but it is hard to measure those collections.)

Considering that total digital music sales were about 581 million digital tracks, that still means a lot of WMA tracks out there, about 87 million. http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117956655.html?c ategoryid=16&cs=1 [variety.com] Note that this gives AAC downloads about 406 million tracks downloaded, so it would also not be unreasonable to claim that many iPod owners listen to AAC. (Links do not specify region, but data appears to be U.S. only.)

A little more

[SuperKendall]

I think it's a ploy to take attention away from the sucky fact that the only "apps" they're allowing on the iPhone are web pages. Oooh, innovative.

Can you automatically pull up maps or dial phone numbers from pages you browse on your cell phone?

Perhaps there is a little more there than you think in the way of innovation.

Re:They're Not There to Win

[Kalriath]

Everyone knows that mp3 is OK, but the quality is not as good as AAC or WMA at similar bitrates. Would you rather have improved codecs in an open format like AAC or a format controlled by Microsoft? I'll take the open format thanks.
 

http://www.vialicensing.com/Licensing/MPEG4_object _Licenses.cfm?product=MPEG-4AAC [vialicensing.com]

Redefining "Open" are we? Yes, Apple is a licensor of the patented AAC algorithms.

Re:They're Not There to Win

[Kjella]

Well, if we're redefining "open" to mean "not patented" then you may also strike MP3 [mp3licensing.com]. Perhaps you were thinking of some definition of free?

Re:They're Not There to Win

[Tickletaint]

That's not true, or highly misleading at best. I think you might be technically correct in stating that Firefox supports more "selectors"—I just today ran into some problems with WebKit's lack of support for the nth-child and last-child selectors—but as far as supporting more of the selectors, properties, rules, and other CSS features that are likely to be used by web designers, and in implementing them according to the standard, WebKit's got Gecko beat hands down.

Just from today's work, I can tell you Gecko lacks support for box-shadow, background-size, text-shadow, and colors specified as rgba() values, and its support for border-radius is incomplete. It also screws up the display of absolutely positioned generated content relative to a relatively positioned owning element. WebKit gets all of this right.

Additionally, Gecko renders text like shit, but you really don't want to get me started on that...

6 Invalid Reasons Why People Should Not Switch

[adah]

1. Control + Enter shortcut doesn't exist.

You don't need it. Just hit Enter. BTW, although I consider myself an experienced PC user (no Mac experience at all), I do not know this shortcut key. I dare say a very small percentage of people know about it.

2. Refitting the browser window to the desktop is challenging.

I can't imagine how difficult it is. On the contrary, I often found myself mis-resize the windows. I did waste some time to resize it back, since generally I like to have fixed-size windows (esp. true for browsers, in order to test standard resolutions).

3. Plug-in support is non-existent.

It turns out the author confused plug-ins with add-ons. Plug-in support is there, but add-ons are few. I do not think add-ons are a blocking issue, since people are using Internet Explorer without add-ons most of the time.

4. Your website and application won't look/work correctly.

This is even not worth rebutting. This is the reason why Web developers need Safari on Windows and why it is beta.

5. Importing bookmarks not a part of the installation process.

I can't understand why it is an issue. If only you click on Bookmarks - Show All Bookmarks, you will see all the imported bookmarks immediately.

6. Another reason I can't justify buying a Mac.

This varies between people. I like the look of Safari, and I believe Safari on Mac will have fewer bugs and less memory footprint. So it will not affect when I am to buy a Mac (I don't have one yet, but am considering buying one).