Despite
some beta hiccups, various reviews have confirmed one consistent fact: Safari is fast. Very fast. Apple says this browser renders HTML twice as fast as Internet Explorer 7 and 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2. I didn't benchmark it, but I can say it is indeed faster than either one. Javascript also shows obvious speed increases. (To drive this point home, Jobs even displayed a demo of how quickly Safari opens pages at WWDC. Speed was a major emphasis when it came to Safari.)
So what do we have? A free, speedy Mac-developed browser for Windows users. That's the
what. As for the
why, step back, see the pieces and how they fit together.
As I watched Jobs' speech again and tinkered with Safari,
I realized Apple hadn't just ported over Safari willy-nilly; Apple had to port everything that makes it run, and that meant WebKit. For those who don't know, WebKit is the application framework that allows for developers to quickly access the Web on their Mac OS X application. An obvious example would be Safari, but a slew of apps use WebKit, including Mail, BBEdit, Coda and the iTunes Music Store. A quick glance at webkit.org confirmed that a Windows version of the open-source project has recently been seeded. Hmmmm. Jobs also mentioned that there are three versions of Safari: one for Mac OS X, one for XP and one for Vista. What he neglected to detail is the fourth version of Safari: the one for the iPhone. After the Safari-on-Windows announcement, Jobs moved to a demonstration of Web apps in the iPhone version of Safari. For that demo, Jobs showed that the full Safari engine is in the iPhone, which enables Web applications written in the language of Web 2.0 with AJAX to integrate with iPhone's services. Scott Forstall showed off an example of a Web-based contact application (which accessed an LDAP database on the back end) whose appearance and usability was nearly identical to the Contact application on the phone. From the demo, Forstall showed that the iPhone Safari speed was very responsive, loading each page quickly.
Soon after the keynote ended, the first third-party application for the iPhone appeared:
OneTrip. This simple shopping application -- plus the Forstall demonstration -- gives you an idea of how straight-forward using Web apps are with the iPhone -- and why opening up WebKit and Safari to Windows users and developers is important. It makes it easy for developers to write apps using Safari as the platform. With Safari now ported to Windows, that means the same application could work on both Macs
and PCs -- nearly 100% of the market!
That's what's in it for developers. For more mainstream users, who care only about being able to surf to their favorite site, Safari represents another move by Apple to get its highly touted software in front of people who may never have heard of Safari, much less tried out Apple's other apps or hardware. Woo them with a few well-crafted programs such as Safari or iTunes, and -- Jobs no doubt hopes -- you can win them to the operating system itself.
And when Apple puts that same well-crafted app -- Safari -- on what may be the hottest must-have device of the year, the iPhone, it reinforces the big-picture message: Apple suddenly seems to be everywhere. Sure, you can buy a Mac and get the whole Apple experience. But now you can get an iPhone and get the same kind of experience. Or fire up your Apple TV and get the same experience on your TV. And now, with the release of the one application virtually everyone online uses -- a browser -- you can fire up Windows and get the Apple experience.
Google has accused Microsoft of anti-competitive behavior with its search tools, according to a new complaint revealed by the New York Times. The complaint, linked closely with a consent decree for Microsoft, charges Windows [COLOR=red ! important][FONT="][COLOR=red ! important][FONT="]Vista's[/FONT][/FONT][/COLOR][/COLOR] system-wide search service with arbitrarily hurting Google Desktop Search. Users who run the latter on Vista frequently encounter a significant slowdown since the Vista search can't be turned off. This discourages most users from staying with the Google option, the company says. The implementation is said to violate the 2002 antitrust agreement that ultimately forced Microsoft to allow rival web browsers and other programs to be set as the factory default for [COLOR=red ! important][FONT="][COLOR=red ! important][FONT="]new [/FONT][COLOR=red ! important][FONT="]PCs[/FONT][/COLOR][/FONT][/COLOR][/COLOR]. The legal challenge has encountered setbacks, according to the paper. Federal assistant attorney general Thomas Barnett issued a statement in May dismissing Google's claim, arguing that antitrust law wasn't there to "pick who would win" and that the government was not meant to stop companies from "innovating and improving" their products.....
