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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.'"
No, really. They acknowledge that Opera 6 sucks pretty bad, and promis that 7 will rock ass on OS X.
If anything, though, I'd think Chimera would be the one hurting Opera the most.
The fact that it costs money certainly doesn't help matters.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
Irrelevant. Microsoft used their monopoly in one market [operating systems] to hinder competition in another market [browsers]. Apple does not have a monopoly in the OS market, so this does not apply to them
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
If Konqueror doesn't use the Opera engine, will Opera drop linux support? Since they've released a Windows version, they must've gotten Microsoft to use the Opera engine in Explorer...
Yeah it sucks when Apple releases a free version of your App... but it would suck more if there were less Macs to sell your app to. Apple releasing a web browser was a very neccesary step for Apple to keep tha Mac platform alive and to try and take away the Wintel market share. The more mac users, the bigger the market for Mac developers.
Opera has a head start on Safari... instead of giving up, they could just try and out-innovate Safari they way Watson has out-innovated Sherlock.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
If they can't produce to web browser that will cause people to buy it over Safari, then they should just not develop Opera for the Mac. There's nothing wrong with that.
And before anyone says anything, this does not mean that Apple has an illegal monopoly. There is nothing wrong with not propping up third-party developers.
-Brent
well, it's not quite the same as fritos. When I buy fritos, I don't have to buy a special version of Coke that is designed to be eaten with Fritos. I don"t have to recompile or purchase new products if i switch from doritos to fritos. Software and operating systems are fundamentally different from other products.
In what way, and for what reason, do you feel this to be so? What do you mean by "won't integrate it"?
After all, Safari already interfaces with both Rendezvous and AddressBook right in the main interface, and it offers simple gateways to helper applications like StuffIt, Preview, etc. Not only that, but one of the long term goals for Safari seems to be to make the KHTML engine available to third party application developers. If this isn't "integration", what is?
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
I hope I don't need to explain this further.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
You can drag safari to the trash and destroy it. Software Update will never require you to run safari to update your other components. You can (if you wished) write a wraper for Gecko and drop it in-place for WebCore.
Need I continue?
I live in a giant bucket.
I'm pretty sure what he means is that Safari is not a part of the system like IE for Windows. You want to delete Safari? Drag it to the trash. I have no doubt it will continue to function in this way after the beta period is over.
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
The purpose of public relations is to recast things. Apple may be trying to recast the developers who complain about competitive products poorly so that they don't get public support.
Think of it this way. Because of going to OSX Apple has access to tons of Unix software which is very good but suffers in the ease of use area. Apple as a software company specializes in making products more user friendly this is far and away their #1 skill. While they may have a very tough time beating the price of a barebones x86 machine for years to come, they aren't going to have that hard of a time beating the price of an x86 machine which includes: an OS, office suite including databases, digital entertainment applications, high amateur - low professional video, sound and picture editing, games, publishing suite.... In other words they can create a tremendous value add by bundeling in tons of software on their platform. If they do this however they will devestate the independent Mac publishers that survive on selling truly mediocre products in the $25-75 range.
Is Safari really already so much better than IE that Opera and others see no hope in going up against it?
Honestly it is so much better that it raises the bar of competition significantly. I have a very strange feeling IE7/win will try and adopt many of it's concepts (because to be quite honest for 99.99999% of the world [including most powerusers] Safari has everything you need in a nice clean interface)
I live in a giant bucket.
The analogy holds if Apple prevents resellers from installing or bundling Opera with their Macs, which Apple is probably not going to do.
Microsoft bundling IE is fine.
Apple bundling Safari is fine.
Microsoft integrating IE is fine.
Apple integrating Safari is fine.
Microsoft using it's Windows monopoly to control browsers is bad.
Apple using it's desktop monopoly to control browsers is bad.
To expand: Microsoft manipulating licensing agreements and fees to prevent OEMs from bundling Netscape or making Netscape the default is bad. Microsoft using mshtml in Outlook, Outlook Express, Explorer, Internet Explorer, is fine, but if they used their marketing muscle to prevent bundling/packaging of other software is bad.
In Apple's case, this is *plain* competition. IE is the default. Netscape/Mozilla is the popular alternative. Apple releases a competitive browser. Opera decides not to compete, Opera's loss.
GPL Deconstructed
Currently. Will that still be true if/when KHTML & any other aspects of Safari become part of the system libraries? Maybe the Safari interface to those libraries will be easily removeable, but will that mean anything?
Same objection applies -- the SoftwareUpdate application still seems to do HTTP communication and some kind of extraction of data returned from the web. Okay, so it's not doing real HTML rendering now, but if the library is just waiting to be used then why couldn't it be applied in a future version? (IMO, Microsoft just uses IE for WindowsUpdate just because it's so easy to put that info into a web page rather than having to keep a separate application on every instance of Windows they ship. The fact that Apple came to a different conclusion on this matter isn't very impressive to me one way or the other.).
A better example might be the help system -- that all seems to just be simple HTML rendering, and I don't see any reason that they wouldn't transition this to a KHTML based backend in a future release.
Quite true. So what?
Could you please? I remain unconvinced. You've given a handful of offhand remarks about how you can route around or remove Safari. That in my opinion doesn't refute the fact that Safari -- especially for a beta release -- is already remarkably integrated into the system, even if in a "loose coupling / tight cohesion" kind of way where, as I say, everything works well together but, as you say, components can still be removed or replaced without too much pain. I don't see any reason not to expect the cohesion among Safari and the rest of the system to get even tighter in post-Beta versions, and it remains an open question whether the loos coupling aspect that you're leaning on will remain part of the picture (though I think we both hope that loose coupling will still work well in future releases).
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
See this article -- Chimera Developer Considers Dropping It as well. Quite honestly, I don't think that this is a big deal. As others have already pointed out, Apple was already bundling MSIE with OS X, and I never saw anybody complain that that was killing Chimera or Opera. This is simply another web browser for OS X. If you find that Browser X suits your needs best, then simply download Browser X, and drag Browser Y to the trash.
opera was already losing their edge awhile ago.. they had plenty of time to to catch up, and they did not.. so their problem.
Everything you said in your comment was what you imagine Apple could do. If you are looking to argue about speculation as to what Apple could theoretically do, I think that's a waste of time. Yes, they could go so far as to do all the things Microsoft did to tie IE to Windows.
All you can look at is what Apple's situation is now, and what their general philosophy is. Right now, Safari is totally optional. It's safe to say it will be the browser on the dock on new machines once it is ready. It can simply be dragged to the trash to be erased. This isn't just the way Safari works-- if I want to delete Mail.app, iChat, iMovie, etc., all I have to do is drag the app to the trash. It is part of the easy and intuitive user experience that Apple has always had over Windows, and that has become especially strong in OS X.
Additionally, look at Apple's gameplan. Apple is trying to further the Mac OS, in order to further Apple hardware. They aren't trying to make Safari the dominant browser that crushes all others. Apple felt that a simple browser that is OS X through-and-through, and that integrates with the other iApps, was a very useful piece to making the OS X experience better. The other side-motivation that possibly exists would be to push away the dominant MS products and offer a worthy alternative. In this case it isn't to crush IE, but to keep MS from crushing Apple by leveraging IE.
So, yes, there exists a possibility that Apple could go counter to the way they have developed all their other applications and go against the general design of the platform, but until I start seeing some sort of evidence to at least suggest this is what they are trying to do, I don't see the point in arguing over it.
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
> because to be quite honest for 99.99999% of the world [
Except for the three to ten percent of us who use Mozilla (and derivatives), Opera, or Konq, which all have TABBED BROWSING.
Of course it's inflammatory. How isn't an ultimatum from Opera Software inflammatory? Just sounds like Apple responding in kind to me. The Apple response wasn't in the story earlier. It's less inflammatory than, "BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA," or "Opera? Opera who?" which I imagine gives the gist of the responses by the Apple reps when they heard about this.
Riiight. Somehow I don't see Apple buying this, particularly given that KHTML is an arguably "better" renderer, and I'd imagine costs a lot less to work with than this particular "option".
Looks like Opera just don't want to cross-develop, and they're going to blame whoever they can for their reason. No great loss; there's heaps of resonable-to-good browsers on the platform, so I'm sure we can live without.
Look at Opera's history of competing with bundled browsers:
But, somehow, a beta product is going to cause Opera to leave the Mac market?
Please. The real reason is buried in the article:
Opera simply wasn't successful on the Mac like it was on Windows. I personally suspect that that's because Opera didn't make the switch to the Mac UI very effectively (hard to describe, but it just felt weird relative to using it in Windows), and didn't have the same feel for performance programming in MacOS, making Opera feel sluggish (unlike its trademark lightning-fast performance in Windows).I think Opera just can't compete on the Mac, knows this, and has made a token "hell why not" offer to Apple to stick around for big money to have an excuse to leave.
--Matthew
That's sort of saying "Ford has a monopoly on Ford cars" and then claiming shipping the car with a stereo is anti-competitive.
Apple does have a monopoly over "Macintosh" computers because they won't sell licenses. They relaxed their hold for a few years and allowed clones, then changed their mind. There is now no way to build a legal clone, except maybe to cannibalize a working computer for the proprietary parts. If you need a Mac-compatible computer, you must go to Apple, and with it you'll get their OS, too.
A monopoly is not illegal unless abused in some way. Microsoft's monopoly over Windows is not per se illegal. But their attempt to leverage IE by using their monopoly power was, obviously, improper. That IE is free changed nothing -- rather, it underscored that IE was getting a free ride thanks to the underlying profitable monopoly.
Now, within the market of Mac-compatible computers, I'm wondering how Apple bundling more and more products into its ubiquitous OS could not eventually cause the same sort of problem. Unlike what Microsoft was doing by "integrating" Windows, the Apple components are pretty easily to deactivate. However, the Apple products are clearly intended to be competitive, and at some point Apple might be said to abuse its monopoly over Macs to shoehorn in other things.
It's difficult to imagine, mostly because they're not Microsoft, but what if Apple were to squeeze out competitiors by embedding the free stuff or refusing to publish its API's and so on? The millions of Mac users can't just switch to another OS without getting a new computer, and their choices would end up being Apple's choices. [Now that there is a robust open source browser market developing, I don't think browsers will be the next battleground.]
Yo frankie... Take a chill pill and settle down!!! Apple was forced to make their own browser. They've sat by the wayside and watched as not a single browser developer has brought a reliable product to market. If Opera hadn't treated Mac users as second class citizens, they would have a competitive on the market, but they don't. If M$ had brought a cocoa version of IE to market and quashed the bugs user after user complains of, there would be no safari... If OmniWeb and Chimera would come along more quickly there wouldn't be an issue... But no... Not a single vendor has given us a fast and stable product. Safari will do one thing... It will raise the bar for which third party developers to compete. I have a feeling you haven't used Safari, but Apple has taken the minimalist approach... It does two things and two things well... It's fast and it's stable. Omni web can and will build a competitive browser, most likely using the same rendering engine... Chimera will have all the features Safari is missing... IE will hopefully die away as they seem to have no interest in fixin IE. The open source community will benefit from Apple's work here, I don't see what the issue is. Opera can either put up or shut up, their product is inferior...
You fail to notice probably 20-30% of safari users came from tabbed browsers. I don't really think there are that many people in this world who really utilize tabbed browsing, so making a mainstream browser with tabs is silly (have you tried teaching it to someone who barely gets WIMP, it's rather like beating your head into the wall).
Tabbed browsing does not belong in a clean interface. Peroid.
I live in a giant bucket.
The basic idea of Opera is great. Lots of options, privacy protection, tabbed browsing, separate browser window, etc. I've tried to switch to it - but it's impossible to deal with all its quirks, bugs and slowness.
My biggest complaint is that it does NOT handle tables or forms correctly. I've included some examples to play with (there are many more, just do a search).
For many of these bugs to exist in version SIX of a browser is just plain crappy. Especially considering that Safari and Chimera in their beta versions are nowhere as problematic and render pages beautifully.
Opera is killing itself and they company is using Safari as an excuse.
If anyone is killing Opera, it's Opera. I tried it and I thought it sucked. I tried Safari and Safari rocked! For now though, the best browser is still Chimera. We'll see what else Apple comes up with with the full release of Safari. While it would be a shame to lose some diversity on the Mac if Opera ceased, they should really be trying to make a better product rather than complaining about Apple.
Well yes, I paid for iCab.
In fact the developer got so many petitions from from people asking to pay for the browser when iCab had no arrangements to handle payments that they had to set up a way to pay just to keep users happy.
Why pay? Use iCab and you'd find out soon enough. There are shareware developers out there that make products of such high quality that fit users' needs so well that it's hard for a person like myself not want to show my appreciation for all the time and effort the developers put in.
When I paid for iCab it had already proved to be worth its weight in gold.
It's incredible the amount of 'new' features that are popping up on other browsers that had been on iCab for ages.
It's not slow (not the fastest either), it's not perfect (CSS support is not finished) but there is so much in the thing in such a small codebase that if you are looking for more control in your surfing habits then iCab probably is the browser for you.
My brother-in-law who is a control freak and pro Linux was positively drooling over what iCab was doing when he came round to check it out.
And it's not even finished yet!