Safari on Windows: So?

Posted on June 14, 2007
Filed Under /dev/null/ | 350 views |

I’ve been thinking a bit about Apple’s recent release of Safari for Windows and whether or not it matters. To anyone who isn’t a rabid, tattooed Mac fanatic, that is.

Microsoft and Mozilla have both weighed in with their requisite perspectives (I’ll save you the jump - Mozilla: “Oh, you’re cute little thing, you are. Now let the adults talk” and Microsoft: “IE 7… IE 7… NO! IE 7! I. E. 7. ie7 ie7 ie…”) and the Safari folks themselves seem really excited about it, what with all the confetti and cake and balloons and things, but what about for the rest of us?

I thinking. No big deal, Safari on Windows. No big deal at all.

Safari is my browser of choice on the Mac but only because Mac Firefox is so fantastically bloated and memory-hungry on my lowly 867 MHz PPC G4 laptop right now that opening Firefox is too painful save for trouble-shooting the most dire of Javascript debugging nightmares.

And Firefox is ugly to boot. Real ugly. Un-Mac-like ugly. Bag over its head ugly (but not so ugly that you wouldn’t take it home at the end of the night ’cause you did, didn’t you? You’re probably reading this in Firefox right now, aren’t you? Yeah….) But rumour has it Firefox will pretty up in future versions (native widgets?) and I’ve no doubt that the Firefox team will continue to optimize so mostly I’m just waiting for that day in The Future when I’ve upgraded my hardware (why won’t you die already laptop, why won’t you die?!?!) and Firefox has improved and then yeah, Safari’s out the door, sad but true.

I’ll miss you little fella.

No, that’s not true actually, and not because I’m a callous, uncaring bastard. Instead, it’s because Safari is rapidly become just the candy and icing wrapper around WebKit, the sweet, sticky, open-sourced core that handles the rendering of the web content for Safari, for Dashboard widgets, for Nokia’s cellphone browser, for Apple’s iPhone and now, with Safari over on Windows… well, who knows what on that platform?

I do. I know what, that’s who. And by “know” I mean in the way that a guy with absolutely no inside connections to Apple who’s sitting on the couch watching TV can know so mostly I have no idea whatsoever but I suspect, and I suspect this: WebKit on Windows is the thin edge of the wedge, another sidestep on Apple’s part away from the Mac as standalone computing platform and towards the “Apple” brand as ubiquitous computing (dare I say even “entertainment”, dare I say even more a “service”) company.

iPods on both platforms and the MP3 player market is reborn. iTunes on both platforms and iTunes Music Store sales soar. AppleTV as stand-alone hardware, a Mac - and more importantly prior Mac experience - not required. Most certainly the iPhone will not be tied to the Mac; expect anything the iPhone can do on a Mac to also be possible on a PC, including development. Apple has been sort’a mostly telling developers to expect to be able to build apps on the iPhone using DHTML and Ajax. And WebKit.

WebKit on Windows makes me think we’ll see Dashboard and widgets on Windows at some point (competing directly with the thing Microsoft is shipping in Vista today). We’ll see a common codebase in the iTunes store bringing feature compatibility across both platforms (not so important today per se but I’d wager it factors into Apple’s plans for the future of ITMS). But most importantly of all, its more exposure for Apple over on the Windows side of things in a manner that isn’t combative, aggressive or derogatory towards actual flesh-and-blood PC users.

I think it is no coincidence that while Apple Marketing continues to air its endless stream of funny-but-aggressive anti-PC ads Apple App Development continues to push useful Apple products out to Windows users. The message seems to be this: Apple is not anti-Windows user, it is anti-Windows mediocrity. Windows users can still be Apple cool even if shackled to Windows (but never quite as cool as they could if they had a real Mac of course).

So welcome to Windows, kid. Good luck.

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