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Safari Killing Opera for Mac OS X?
analog_line writes "According to an article at News.com, the folks at Opera have given an ultimatum to Apple: Use the Opera engine in Safari or we'll have to rethink developing Opera for the Mac. While I know people who use Opera for the Mac, I find it hard to believe that Opera thinks they'll get any response other than, 'enjoy developing for one less platform.'"
Rendezvous is an open-sourced public API, and its documentation can be found here. Address Book's functions are also published, and developer documentation can be found here. And if you look at Apple's Cocoa documentation, you'll find that Apple already includes basic HTML rendering capabilities in its NSTextView class. You're using it whenever you view an HTML message in Mail or make use of Project Builder's built-in documentation viewer, or when you launch OS X's Help Viewer application. So by making the WebCore framework available to the public (which, you should remember, it HAS NOT YET DONE), Apple would essentially be doing nothing more than UPGRADING its HTML rendering capabilities.
Really I think the burden of proof is on you. If I drag Safari to the Trash it will be as if Safari never existed.
On my system Chimera is far more integrated than Safari. When I open an html file or webloc or tell another app to open a page, it opens in Chimera. (Chimera even appears automatically on my list of possible default browsers. OSX 10.1 only showed IE automatically)
The only real way in which the System and Safari are linked is that when Safari 1.0 comes out the system will tell me. Of course by the time it does I will have already seen it on VersionTracker and read articles about it on MacSlash and possibly Slashdot. And if I never want to see another Safari release in my life after that I can tell System Update to stop showing Safari to me.
The only integration is that Safari looks like an iApp and it accesses the same features provided to 3rd party browsers.
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
I think you've summed it up well there. Opera on the macs I've used it on (400Mhz G3 with Jaguar, and a few G4/Dual G4s also with Jaguar) just doesn't compete. It's noticeably slower than IE, chimera and Safari, and featurewise doesn't offer anything I can't get on the other browsers.
That's not to say there aren't other people with needs that Opera addresses just perfectly, however.
There is a world of difference between the two, but this discussion brings up some interesting points. It is my contention that the operating system vendor should be able to define an operating system to be whatever they like. The difference in Microsoft's case, as has been pointed out numerous times, is that Microsoft illegally leveraged their OS monopoly to eliminate competition to their browser. In addition, they leveraged their effective monopoly in office applications and Win32 development tools toward the same end. You want to install Office 97? Internet Explorer is required. Same if you want to install Visual Studio 6.0. Same if you want to install any other Microsoft application. I will be surprised if to gain higher browser share from Mac IE, Apple bundles Safari with Final Cut Pro for instance. Moreover, it can be argued that a consumer-oriented operating system is useless without a browser & an e-mail client, so why not allow operating system vendors to distribute this software with the OS? Apple has clearly chosen this course, bundling all manner of application with their OS to gain competitive advantage over other operating systems (read: Windows). The problem arises, of course, when the operating system vendor has over 90% of the operating system market. Thus the correct solution to the MS antitrust case was not one OS company and a few application companies, but several OS companies and several application companies. The Economist magazine's editorial page got this right, but no one else I read at the time did. And as a final point, if Apple choosing a browser to bundle with the OS is inherently anti-competitive, then Safari shouldn't change anything as they've been bundling Mac IE with OS X for awhile, and the Mac browser market seems to be pretty healthy.
Another interesting aspect of this is that if you read Judge Jackson's findings in the Microsoft anti-trust case, the court defined Microsoft's market to be operating systems running on x86-based systems, explicitly ruling out other architectures (though they do note that even counting these other architectures, Microsoft still has an OS monopoly). Even though saying that any company with 3% of the market in anything has monopoly power is a bit silly, and an argument based on this would never be given the time of day in court (hopefully), still in this regard Apple theoretically could be accused of having a monopoly in PowerPC-based operating systems (server OSs don't count either, using the government's definition). In addition, one of the major benefits Apple will get from Safari is a system-level HTML rendering engine to be integrated into the OS and available to all applications (and they need since their current implementation sucks pretty hard). Microsoft wanted the same thing with IE, and it does add value to their platform, largely through DHTML extensions if my understanding is correct (e.g. full-featured Windows Help; free HTML e-mail message renderer; the "task bar" on the left of Explorer windows in 2000 & XP, if you have it enabled; and many other examples). Another similarity is that one of the prime government contentions against Microsoft was that they intimidated OEMs into putting the IE icon on the desktop rather than Netscape's. Since Apple is its own OEM, you will almost certainly get Safari on the dock on all new systems. So in these respects Apple's position and intentions parallel Microsoft's. And Apple has already done the same thing by integrating the Address Book with the system in 10.2. If third-party developers ever use this to any degree, it will be difficult to compete with Apple in this space, unless you're content writing your own front-end over their API & data store.
Even taking all of this into account, there are still big differences between Apple and Microsoft. As many have pointed out, it is and most certainly will be possible to drag Safari to the trash if you don't want it, and this point is absolutely critical. This is not possible in Windows with IE (or any of their bundleware, such as Windows Media Player). Apple has not colluded with other browser vendors to illegally divide the market between them. Microsoft did. Apple does not vigorously attack all middleware providers (Sun with Java, for instance) as threats to their OS, as Microsoft did. And so on.
However, that said there is still a good chance that Mac users will end up disproportionately using Apple's browser if for no other reason than because it is made by Apple (we all know the same herd mentality applies to most Windows users), thus sending a chill through the third-party Mac browser market. Whether that will be a good or bad thing remains to be seen.
And to respond directly to the point of this article, I've never used it but from what I've heard Opera on OS X is crap, so they've got some balls putting this as a pseudo-ultimatum to Apple. The folks in Cupertino are probably shitting themselves laughing.
Sorry for the long post.