Will Windows users switch to Safari?
The new version has some intriguing features but there are already several great browsers for Windows based machines.
Fortunately for Apple, it doesn’t have to win a lot of market share for Safari on Windows to be a winner.
Apple’s announcement yesterday at WWDC in San Francisco that they’ve ported Safari to Windows was, at first, a head-scratcher. Why bother?
The Windows platform has many fine browsers: Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer 7 just to name a few. Safari isn’t even the best browser for the Mac. Apple seemed to be adding a “me-too” product to the browser ranks.
Digging deeper, things start to make a little more sense. Apple isn’t talking about bringing the current Safari to Windows. The version on Windows will be “the new version”, Version 3, now in beta. Version 3 has several intriguing new features for tabs, searches and forms.
Users can re-order tabs by dragging them around. They can drag a tab out of a browser window and use it to start a new window. The browser provides improved searching on individual pages and in a feature that will be a real treat for people who participate in Web forums, the browser has resizable text input fields for Web forms.
As an added bonus, Apple claims that Safari renders Web pages significantly faster than either IE7 or Firefox 2.
The features Apple brags about with Safari or very similar features, are already available either standard or with browser extensions in Firefox.
As for performance, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say it just doesn’t matter much. We’re not living in the days when a 28.8 kbps modem was standard. Most of us have high-speed Internet connections at home and in the office.
I don’t really care about page-rendering speed and I don’t hear about other people caring either. People do care about throughput for multimedia files, of course but that’s a whole different matter.
I’m not predicting a rush for people to adopt Safari on Windows.
So what’s Apple up to?
I’m guessing this may be about the iPhone. The iPhone is going to run Safari and Apple will allow developers to write Safari apps that run on the iPhone. Windows users may need to run Safari to get access to some synchronization features with iPhone and the desktop.
Thinking about this a little more, even a small sliver of the Windows market share will give Safari a huge boost in the raw number of its installed base, which would make Safari a more attractive platform for developers and could increase the range of applications available for the iPhone.
What do you think? Why is Apple bringing Safari to Windows? Do you think it will win much browser market share? Do you plan to use it?
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[...] Windows Users Don’t Care About Safari Technorati Tags: safari for windows, safari browser, safari [...]
Well, here’s a reason: It’s better then Firefox (except for the plugin feature) And IE plain sucks
[...] GeekWithLaptop [...]
[...] Windows-gebruikers echt te wachten op een nieuwe browser? Waarschijnlijk niet. Maar ik denk wel dat GeekWithLaptop Sean het bij het rechte eind heeft: I’m guessing this may be about the iPhone. The iPhone is [...]
Hi Sean,
I’m not sure it will get a large amount of users but I’m sure Apple have there reasons. It will certainly help web developers running Windows, so I am happy about it even if I will still use Firefox for most of my browsing.
People are still missing the point…the release for is for ajax developers. iPhone, anyone?