I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
Apple’s developer conference on today was light on announcements with the main item of interest for me the Safari 3 beta.
Safari is the Apple Internet browser. Lightweight, and well integrated it is my favorite browser, but has poor standards support so many Mac users have Safari and Firefox installed. I use Safari for gMail and Firefox for apps.
Many web vendors don’t support Safari. The issues are mainly around controls like Rich Text Editing.
One of the big announcements was that Safari 3 is available for Windows XP and Vista. Jobs wants to up Safari’s market share to greater than 5%. I can’t see why a Windows user would want Safari. iTunes looks out of place in Windows, so will Safari I exepct. If Steve just made Safari the best browser (and only browser needed) for the Mac that would help.
Apple are using a trojan horse distribution strategy for Windows Safari. Sounds like it will be a mandatory pull down with iTunes. Sneaky. How they try to make Safari the default for Windows iTunes users will be fun to watch (not!).
Web developers all over will be evaluating the standards support in Safari 3 to see what work is required to support the updated browser. This is a pain. If standards supports still suck, it will be quickly dropped. If it is close then vendors will have to decide if they code for Safari. Maybe it will ‘just work’.I hope so but a quick test on some pages we have with FCKEditor doesn’t fill me with confidence. Be interesting to watch the commentary over the next few days.
I guess the Safari work comes out of Apple being now based over Intel. As hardware differentiation becomes less the argument for Apple to do an operating system that installs on any PC gets more compelling. Safari, Bootcamp, Parallels and VMWare show that this is technically possible.
If Leopard stays as a lightweight operating system it becomes a real alternative to Vista which is not getting the enterprise traction Microsoft would like. If I was on the board of Apple I’d be investing big in enterprise features for OSX. Regardless of what you think of Vista or OSX, one of the biggest ISV opportunities right now is making OSX work in the Enterprise. That is a wide, wide open space. Expect one of the systems management vendors to start buying up and aggregating OSX system management technologies. When you see that happening, time to bet big on AAPL.
Other updates for Leopard we’ve seen before. Apple is still calling October for Leopard release.
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I’ve used Safari on the Mac for several years, and it seems comparable to Firefox in terms of standards support. Interestingly, going forward it will become the mechanism for developing iPhone applications:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/infoworld/20070611/tc_infoworld/89276
Just downloaded the Safari beta, and installed it on Vista64: you can get it as a separate download, without QuickLime which I abhor. Where did you see that it will be bundled with iTunes?
Safaris seems OK so far…
I just downloaded and installed as well. Feels suprisingly similar to on the Mac. If nothing else this will be great for web developers who want to build on Windows and test compatibility with both the Mac and the iPhone, of course this in turn adds value to those two platforms themselves (Steve also announced that third party apps for the iPhone will be run through Safari).
You are so wrong, Safari has very good standards support and has done so largely since it’s inception. There were some relatively minor issues in the early days and some DOM issues that needed to be ironed out but since then we haven’t really paid too much attention. As each new version is released it just works with our site. I work for a small NZ financial organisation, our site is totally standards-based, and all our pages validate against the W3 standards (apart from a couple of pages where we use the autocomplete=”off” attribute to help ensure sensitive form data isn’t retained by the browser).
From Apple’s own website, “Safari uses open source software for its web page rendering engine, drawing on KHTML and KJS software from the KDE open source project”. Apple did not start from scratch and built Safari on the shoulders of an existing project. There is a healthy development ecosystem around Safari and I would only expect Safari to improve with time.
And QuirksMode which is a respected authority on such matters has some very nice things to say about Safari (http://www.quirksmode.org/browsers/safari.html). QuirksMode is also a good resource for documented Safari bugs and bugs for other browsers.
Personally I would expect Safari 3 to just work with our site. It would be unusual for a more recent browser version to suddenly break something that used to work, assuming of course a standards-based approach to web development. And a quick review using Safari 3 Beta for Windows indicates that the Windows version also behaves well with our site.
Brief first look from me here.
Spell check is nice feature so far.
Hi,
I think this is more about the iPhone than trying to convert the Windows world, think of it as the next stage in the ecosystem after iPod/iTunes. When users want to get the most out of their iPhones they’ll use safari! As a Mac user with a Windows mobile phone I wish someone would cut us the same slack!
I was fascinated by the extension of the iTunes/Coverflow concept throughout OSX (very smart as the remote will become as important as the mouse!) I think the whole convergence play is looking very slick.
Funny thing is I use Firefox with my Google apps as I think they work better there but Safari is definitely faster!
I think Apple have rolled at Safari for Windows because of the iPhone.
It’s the same strategy as when they rolled out iTunes for Windows because of the iPod.
It’s likely that there is going to be some strong integration between the iPhone and Safari in terms of shared bookmarks, data syncing, and other WebKit based application sharing support.
Seeing as Jobs wants iPhone apps to basically be custom webapps, if they can leverage webkit features like canvas to build really slick UIs then users would expect the same seamless experience on their windows machine.
Safari it is then :)
Trojan horse strategy: too right.
Standards?: Safari is right up there AFAIK.
AAPL: buy (but don’t quote me).
Safari is nice, but I tend to use FireFox on the Mac as it more reliably works with more websites (however, Natwest Bank support Safari but not Firefox for their online banking).
Installed Safari on an XP machine last night and it ran fine, however it crashes when I open it on Vista… :-(
If they updated Safari to support more standards and websites like IE7 or FireFox then I would consider switching to it.
Having Inquisitor running on Safari on Windows would be fab.
Interesting article here by Joel Spolsky on how blurry Apple rendering makes fonts look on Windows.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html
If Apple want to get some real traction in the enterprise market, then they need to provide enterprise support. Waiting 3 to 10 days to get my Mac fixed is not on!
Joe, two points:
1) I think there are different versions for XP and Vista, so if you downloaded on XP and then tried to install on Vista bad things might happen.
2) I’m sure that sites that don’t test with Safari is a *major* reason for Apple to do this. It make it easier for people who might not have a Mac to test their sites, AND if Safari market share increases significantly then they have have all the more *incentive* to do so.
Actually, I have a third point: on the whole, the way to make a site work properly with Safari is to send it exactly the same standards-conforming content as you’d send to FireFox. The sites that don’t work are primarily the ones that don’t recognize Safari’s UserAgent string at all, and default to sending it the weird non-standard stuff that is needed to make IE work.
Sad to see that researchers have already found 3 vulnerabilities in the Safari version for Windows!
Apparently Safari runs just dandy on Vista if you enable “compatibility mode” to emulate XPSP2…
The version 3 beta for OS X is really stable though, so I’m guessing the devs were asked to rush out the Windows beta in time for Steve’s announcement.
I may be stating the obvious too, but I think Apple has an excellent opportunity to grow their OS market share in the next year or two. Just looking at some of the features in Leopard, and I’ve found myself wondering just what I can point to in my copy of Vista Ultimate as the equivalent upgrade from XP if eye candy is taken out of the equation.
Is a bit worrying that they seem to have resources only for focusing on one big thing at a time though (e.g. having to take engineers off Leopard for iPhone). But then, that may be a ruse so they can hog the spotlight over a period of months (”look, we released iphone”, “look, new OS”, “look, new enterprise servers”), which I wouldn’t put past their marketing department.
I was delighted to learn Safari was released for Windows. Even more so when I’ve found the improvements they’ve made since version 2;
- Standards support has always been high. It bet FireFox in the race for the ACID test 2. I can now login and use our SilverStripe CMS in Safari, and it won’t be too hard for the few javascript/CSS anomalies that exist to be resolved. With Safari 2, we had a large amount of work to do.
- Its much faster than FireFox, and now that it supports in-line find, I can be at home with it.
If I were Apple, I’d be annoyed that heaps of Apple evangelists use FireFox as their browser of choice. So in addition to makeing Safari 3 better, they are making it more widely known and endorsed, and can perhaps fend off FireFox eating into their market.
In general, I see this as a way for Safari to be more agressive, and if they can come out with some great innovation in the next 12 months, then it upsets the playing board once more, and we’re into another browser war, which is fantastic for innovation. FireFox will loose their shine and need to pull out cool features rather than be Mr Anti Microsoft. Its lucky they have modules being made by a community (e.g. web developer toolbar) otherwise their slow feature release would hamper them.
The browser war is especially interesting to reignite, as this time, the browse is much more an OS than a light-client side window into a few words and pix.
Finally, it will be interesting to see how Mozilla and Apple battle their calendaring/etc suites, which is needed to unhinge Microsoft Exchange bloated and expensive monopoly.
Leon, I think you are missing the point with Vista. Some people, including IT journalists say “take the eye candy out of Vista and what are you left with - XP”. This is just rubbish. The biggest advance of Vista is not the eye candy (some would say that its the biggest feature of a Mac) but the fact that the OS has been completely rewritten. So the increased stability, the ability to write a DVD backup, have Outlook running and browse the internet without it choking is a major step forward. I have been running it since late in the beta, did a new install when it went live in November(on a new workstation I might add) and have had no problems at all. The only problem I had was with some software companies who were late rewriting their software because it would not work on Vista (not all companies suffered this problem). I also run Office 2007 and I think this is the easiest version of Office by a country mile.
So to answer your question “what did you get other than eye candy” the answer is a new operating system not just a makeover.
Corporates will change to Vista but once again journalists miss the obvious sometimes. Corporates lease hardware and if you have 10,000 or 100,000 users and you are 1 year or 2 years into a 3 year lease, they will not be changing until the lease runs out. And if they do not when the lease runs out it will because their IT department and suppliers are too lazy or incompetent to update their software.
As far as Apple only focusing on one thing at once, this is probably because they do not have the resources of Microsoft. A lot of people under estimate MS ability to churn out a lot of stuff.
Bundling Safari with iTunes is no new trick for Apple. They already did this by bundling iTunes with the Quicktime runtime. Pissed me off big time, because you couldn’t have the quicktime codecs without installing iTunes. It was even initially even optional but now you can not install quicktime without iTunes. I’ve gone into Windows and manually hacked it out, but I really don’t want to be doing this every time. Roll on opensource variants’ of quicktime.
I’m surprised (but then again I’m not surprised) that Apple has not learnt from Microsoft’s mistakes.
It’s pretty stupid and shows that Apple really does treat consumers with contempt
Dermott, I’m going to have to disagree with you on Vista :P
I think the security and stability improvements are welcome, but really just catch up work to the current state of the art. I can’t really claim that as a “feature” when its something which really is taken for granted, and doesn’t change how I use the system at all - How does it make my life better? (Don’t tell me not getting bombarded with spyware is something I should laud Microsoft for, as it shouldn’t have occurred in the first place). I’m trying to come up with reasons for my family here, I’m a developer so my reasons don’t count. I appreciate the OS has had significant work done, but so what? The average user cares not at all :)
I’ve been running Vista since beta too (we’re a Microsoft partner at work), and while I really welcome the fact that my Vista system at work runs really zippy and sans significant issues - Out of the box you don’t have much, compared to what you get when you buy an Apple (lifestyle apps, productivity apps that can be gotten on the cheap, the whole UNIX/OSS space).
That said - the latest iteration of developer tools and platforms (VS, SQL, IIS7, etc) are really quite good, and I’m pretty productive on them.
Leon, well if your question is what should I use at home, then thats up to you. To say that the Apple is better for at home would be I think debatable. Are you talking better value, better graphics, better “lifestyle apps”, better email - don’t believe any of those might be true except lifestyle apps. And we know that MS cannot add in free software because everyone else complains.
If you have kids, while a Mac may introduce them to computing in general it will not help them if they get a job where there is a PC. The problem in NZ as I see it with home users, is that x percent of the population have computers full of knock off software which is why they will not upgrade. Plus probably these days the average family has much less disposable income than 10 years ago (unless you live in a state house and the government pays everything for you).
If you want more choice and a less closed system I think the PC wins hands down.
I dont think you can blame MS for spyware and while there software is not perfect security wise, “no ones is”. Look at the comments above where there are 3 vulnerabilities already.
Dermott, I’ve been using Vista for a while and find the experience generally frustrating. The overall impression I get is that Microsoft wanted to compete with Apple in terms of eye candy and as a result there are an extra couple of layers between me the user and the tools I typically use as a developer, i.e. management console, component services, event viewer, etc. Probably not such a big issue for June Public.
I would absolutely disagree with your take on kids and computers. It is plain silly to suggest a child who uses a Mac will fail in a job using a PC, even if it’s an unskilled MacJob. I would expect my child to ultimately train for a particular industry/profession using the appropriate tools. Their ability using those tools would ultimately determine whether or not they were successful at their job.
More choice and less closed, now you’re really getting silly. Mac OS X is based on a BSD Unix and has access to all the open source software out there, plus obviously a large catalog of non-OSS. Pull your head out of the sand.
Just discovered Apple-F to find in page. Niiice.
Finding that gMail often stalls when replying to messages with ‘loading’ in red.