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Apple Picking a Fight it Can't Win With Safari
Ian Lamont writes "Mike Elgan has an analysis of Apple's successes and concludes that the release of the Safari browser for Windows not only goes against the Apple success formula, but is doomed to a vicious failure: 'The insular Apple universe is a relatively gentle place, an Athenian utopia where Apple's occasional missteps are forgiven, all partake of the many blessings of citizenship, and everyone feels like they're part of an Apple-created golden age of lofty ideas and superior design. But the Windows world isn't like that. It's a cold, unforgiving place where nothing is sacred, users turn like rabid wolves on any company that makes even the smallest error, and no prisoners are taken. Especially the Windows browser market. ... While security nerds were ripping Apple for a buggy beta, the UI enthusiasts started going after Apple for the look and feel. Here's a small sample. Apple can expect much more of this in the future. The problem? Safari for Windows just isn't Windows enough.' Elgan also expects that the Firefox faithful will fight the Safari influx — a theory that has been supported by comments from Mozilla executive John Lilly, who criticized Steve Jobs' 'blurry view of real world' just after Jobs announced Safari for Windows."
Apple didn't release Safari for Windows to compete - it was released so that people can develop their Web 2.0 apps for iPhone...
Leo Laporte's rant on the latest Macbreak Weekly about how it's some new lock in for non-open standards was very disappointing.
That really bothered me. And he and Andy Ihnatko kept going on and on about until Merlin Mann was basically like "Um, do we have any reason to believe its proprietary?" (links added in case people don't know who they are). Leo's usually not like that, and it surprised me, a lot. I wonder what pushed him in that direction.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
So Steve wants to claim 25% marketshare in the browsermarket and kill Firefox, Opera and the rest in the process. When they release a version that will work for me I'll be happy as that means I can test websites for compatibility without having to buy a Mac. However if they are trying to gain a 25% marketshare they have a very long way to go and I very much doubt they can squash Firefox out of the picture so easily.
My freeware games
People use IE because its there. but look what Apples doing...bundling Quicktime/iTunes/Safari in one download. a whole lot of people are going to have Safari..there already...because they downloaded it with iTunes. hmmmm Using your dominace in one market to enter another....thanks for the tip Bill.
With the Intel Platform now standard for Mac, the transfer of Safari to Windows was far less work than it would have been in the beginning.
Not really. If you put CPU specific code in a browser, you should just shoot yourself and admit failure as a developer and/or software engineer. In addition, Safari's rendering comes from WebCore, which is a combination of KHTML (from the KDE folks) and KWQ (which Apple wrote as an adapter). KHTML was running on multiple platforms way before Apple decided to use it.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
The 90's called they want their statistics back.
2007 IE7 IE6 IE5 Fx Moz S O
May 19.2% 38.1% 1.5% 33.7% 1.3% 1.5% 1.6%
A lot of windows users downloaded iTunes because they bundled it with Quicktime, and you had to find a tiny link the size of an ant's toothpick to get Quicktime on it's own. So all the poor chumps who just wanted to watch some .mov file had to download iTunes even tho they didn't want it.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
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I don't think it was meant to be funny. I see your point, many downloaded iTunes because of the iPod. But I myself downloaded at least half a dozen times iTunes by mistake, trying to download QuickTime. I was half-way through a hate-mail to Apple when I finally found the stand-alone download.
"I think I am a fallen star. I should wish on myself."
the more valuable investment of effort is in making the experience great for the vast majority.
Maybe. Let's face it, people who buy Macs typically have more money than the person who's buying a $400 PC at Wal-Mart. If your target is the more affluent web surfer, then making sure your site works in Safari is probably worth your time.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
A quick review of the MP3 players currenty for sale at Amazon and Best Buy shows that every MP3 player except for the iPods plays WMA. Maybe "nobody cares," but WMA was pushed very hard as a candidate for the leading digital music standard. It would not be unreasonable to claim that the main reason it failed to become the de facto standard is because of Apple's iPod and iTunes Music Store. (Which use AAC, a codec definition which is a standard.)
Also, although the market share of the segment is small, WMA-based stores do sell a lot of digital music tracks. See http://www.sptimes.com/2006/10/30/Technology/Digit al_music_users_f.shtml for some music store market shares in 2006, giving WMA around 15%, MP3 around 10%, and iTunes (AAC) around 70%. (Yes, I know that a lot of digital music collections were converted from CD's in whatever format the user chose, but it is hard to measure those collections.)
Considering that total digital music sales were about 581 million digital tracks, that still means a lot of WMA tracks out there, about 87 million. http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117956655.html?c ategoryid=16&cs=1 Note that this gives AAC downloads about 406 million tracks downloaded, so it would also not be unreasonable to claim that many iPod owners listen to AAC. (Links do not specify region, but data appears to be U.S. only.)
I think it's a ploy to take attention away from the sucky fact that the only "apps" they're allowing on the iPhone are web pages. Oooh, innovative.
Can you automatically pull up maps or dial phone numbers from pages you browse on your cell phone?
Perhaps there is a little more there than you think in the way of innovation.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
http://www.vialicensing.com/Licensing/MPEG4_objec
Redefining "Open" are we? Yes, Apple is a licensor of the patented AAC algorithms.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Well, if we're redefining "open" to mean "not patented" then you may also strike MP3. Perhaps you were thinking of some definition of free?
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That's not true, or highly misleading at best. I think you might be technically correct in stating that Firefox supports more "selectors"—I just today ran into some problems with WebKit's lack of support for the nth-child and last-child selectors—but as far as supporting more of the selectors, properties, rules, and other CSS features that are likely to be used by web designers, and in implementing them according to the standard, WebKit's got Gecko beat hands down.
Just from today's work, I can tell you Gecko lacks support for box-shadow, background-size, text-shadow, and colors specified as rgba() values, and its support for border-radius is incomplete. It also screws up the display of absolutely positioned generated content relative to a relatively positioned owning element. WebKit gets all of this right.
Additionally, Gecko renders text like shit, but you really don't want to get me started on that...
Make Slashdot readable! See journal.
You don't need it. Just hit Enter. BTW, although I consider myself an experienced PC user (no Mac experience at all), I do not know this shortcut key. I dare say a very small percentage of people know about it.
I can't imagine how difficult it is. On the contrary, I often found myself mis-resize the windows. I did waste some time to resize it back, since generally I like to have fixed-size windows (esp. true for browsers, in order to test standard resolutions).
It turns out the author confused plug-ins with add-ons. Plug-in support is there, but add-ons are few. I do not think add-ons are a blocking issue, since people are using Internet Explorer without add-ons most of the time.
This is even not worth rebutting. This is the reason why Web developers need Safari on Windows and why it is beta.
I can't understand why it is an issue. If only you click on Bookmarks - Show All Bookmarks, you will see all the imported bookmarks immediately.
This varies between people. I like the look of Safari, and I believe Safari on Mac will have fewer bugs and less memory footprint. So it will not affect when I am to buy a Mac (I don't have one yet, but am considering buying one).