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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.'"
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
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
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
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.
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
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.