Yesterday, Steve Job as part of his keynote at the Apple World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) announced a version of the Apple Safari Browser for Windows.
Job’s was honest and admitted that 4.9% of the market is currently Safari and he would like to increase that amount. So it doesn’t take a genius to work out that the Mac has a larger share of the PC market than 4.9% so many Mac users must be using something other than Safari and to hazard a guess I bet it’s Firefox. So I see the release of the Safari browser as a way for Apple to stem the tide toward Firefox rather than taking on IE. If Safari can take some IE scalps along the way then this is perhaps seen as a bonus but not the core objective.
Many companies (such as Lastminute.com) fully support Safari on the Mac already but this is a choice if this decision was down to pure economics it’s pretty clear that we may not as many of our customers don’t use Safari.
After a few rudimentary tests it’s pretty clear that the Windows version has plenty of errors that the Mac version doesn’t suffer from but I must stress that the Windows version is only in BETA so clearly Adobe (who are writing the port) have some way to go. Saying this the Safari Windows version is receiving a mauling in the Blogsphere and seen as fair-game because it is a public release. Perhaps Apple would have been wise to keep the browser further under wraps until it was more mature, but like I said it’s still in BETA and because it holds that moniker I’m going to give it the benefit of the doubt but it’s not going to enjoy any development to support it until there is version release.
I am very disappointed that Safari does not take any notice of your windows theme settings and is Mac OS X in style. It would give me greater confidence if it took more notice of the base operating system and my personal settings.
I do think the release of Safari is a good thing for us the consumers as more competition can only be a good thing but it does muddy the waters for Developers as we now have yet another browser to support and there isn’t enough hours in the day already. This situation will only subside once all browsers commit to adopting the same standards (and their versions) in a timely fashion however waiting for this to happen will be like waiting for Goddo.
Anyway, I know the web browser is affectively the user’s window onto the web and the greater the share the greater the influence on the web but for the majority of users it makes little difference if they use Safari, Firefox or IE so the real battle will be fought in getting the majority to switch … so this would be a good point to say Apple has iTunes! So iTunes + Quicktime + Safari download anyone?