Slashdot Mirror
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.