Why Safari 3 on PC? For the iPhone!
June 12, 2007
I love Safari on my Mac. It outperforms Firefox for me, the built in RSS support is wonderful, the tabs work better than any of the other browsers, and private browsing (better known as porn mode) can’t be beat. However… it’s really no competition for Firefox or Internet Explorer on the PC platform as an overall browser.
So.. why Safari on the PC? Does Apple truly believe they can compete with Mozilla and Microsoft? I’d say they are not that misguided…
Safari is now available on PC purely to test iPhone applications.
There are a lot of web developers who will be able to develop small applications to deliver through Safari on the iPhone starting on June 29th. Yet, a large majority of the developers will not have iPhones and don’t have Macs. This means Safari needs to be made available for testing on PC for those developers to add value to the iPhone. Although this would be made better if Apple cloned Firebug and rolled that in out of the box…
As far as actual browser usage, I would be shocked to see the web adoption pass 6% for Safari (Apple claims they currently get 4.9%). This may sell a couple more people on Macs, but Safari is not iTunes. It does not stand head and shoulders above competitor software. If they do expand market share in Safari and get a few more people onto a Mac, this is a bonus.
In conclusion… I’m glad to see Safari on PC. Hopefully more web applications will get tested with it… but don’t be fooled this is a move to bolster the iPhone, nothing more.
Tags: apple, browser, explorer, firebug, firefox, internet explorer, iphone, mac, macs, mozilla, osx, pc, safari, web, web application
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2 Responses to “Why Safari 3 on PC? For the iPhone!”
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While I appreciate your skepticism I downloaded PC Safari just to try it out. To my surprise it was so significantly faster than Firefox that I am living with several bugs and new quirks.
Ironically I’ve abandoned Safari on my Mac due to pinwheel waits, so don’t think that this is just my Apple fan-boy-ism showing through. Safari for the PC is fast!
The only reason not to use Safari on the Mac is that it’s bloody hard to develop for - but then, so is Internet Exploder. Seriously, the web development plugins available for Firefox are what makes that browser stand head and shoulders above the rest.
I don’t even do much web development anymore (thank god), but even so I won’t go without http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/