Slashdot Mirror
Is Safari the New Internet Explorer?
An anonymous reader writes: Software developer Nolan Lawson says Apple's Safari has taken the place of Microsoft's Internet Explorer as the major browser that lags behind all the others. This comes shortly after the Edge Conference, where major players in web technologies got together to discuss the state of the industry and what's ahead. Lawson says Mozilla, Google, Opera, and Microsoft were all in attendance and willing to talk — but not Apple.
"It's hard to get insight into why Apple is behaving this way. They never send anyone to web conferences, their Surfin' Safari blog is a shadow of its former self, and nobody knows what the next version of Safari will contain until that year's WWDC. In a sense, Apple is like Santa Claus, descending yearly to give us some much-anticipated presents, with no forewarning about which of our wishes he'll grant this year. And frankly, the presents have been getting smaller and smaller lately."
He argues, "At this point, we in the web community need to come to terms with the fact that Safari has become the new IE. Microsoft is repentant these days, Google is pushing the web as far as it can go, and Mozilla is still being Mozilla. Apple is really the one singer in that barbershop quartet hitting all the sour notes, and it's time we start talking about it openly instead of tiptoeing around it like we're going to hurt somebody's feelings."
"It's hard to get insight into why Apple is behaving this way. They never send anyone to web conferences, their Surfin' Safari blog is a shadow of its former self, and nobody knows what the next version of Safari will contain until that year's WWDC. In a sense, Apple is like Santa Claus, descending yearly to give us some much-anticipated presents, with no forewarning about which of our wishes he'll grant this year. And frankly, the presents have been getting smaller and smaller lately."
He argues, "At this point, we in the web community need to come to terms with the fact that Safari has become the new IE. Microsoft is repentant these days, Google is pushing the web as far as it can go, and Mozilla is still being Mozilla. Apple is really the one singer in that barbershop quartet hitting all the sour notes, and it's time we start talking about it openly instead of tiptoeing around it like we're going to hurt somebody's feelings."
The unisonous response is "no". The author is trying to balance the needle on its tip.
and most won't notice. hit two and they do. hit three, that's jazz.
If Safari is the new internet explorer then that's not bad. If Safari is the old internet explorer then that's really bad.
Better known as 318230.
Yes.
No corporations support it so there is no reason for most of the world to bother supporting it unlike IE.
"Apple is like Santa Claus, descending yearly to give us some much-anticipated presents, with no forewarning about which of our wishes he'll grant this year."
Here's a lump of coal. You'll like it. We'll send you the bill later.
(Apple has always been like that - they Think Different)
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The problems with IE were twofold:
1) It contained tons of rendering bugs that websites relied upon, and so Microsoft's refusal to fix them assured the browser's market dominance by making pages render improperly in competitors' browsers.
2) It was completely insecure.
Safari does not do either of these things.
I think Chrome is closer to the new IE. It has lots of problems, developers code specifically for it and it causes all sorts of development headaches. Not enough people use Safari for it to be an issue.
I'm gonna pay a whole lot of attention to that, for sure.
#DeleteChrome
It's simple. As long as a significant portion of Apple's revenue comes from having a closed, "walled-garden" ecosystem, Apple will be disinclined to participate anything that might result in the demise of that ecosystem. After all, it's hard to be in the same boat as everyone else supporting WebAssembly etc., when that same technology will ultimately result in the death of on-platform app stores.
You are not aware iOS is a major OS?
As a 20yr IT guy,.. who started using Macs (in depth) about 5 to 7 years ago.. I pretty much use Safari for everything. Why?... It gives me the best Stability, Performance and Battery-life. Call it whatever names you want... but it works for me. (and I work in IT.. and push it pretty hard.. so No, I'm not "just surfing Facebook" with it).
Does it really matter that much they aren't at conferences? That shouldn't be where evolution of HTML and browsing happens anyway...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I've always thought of Safari as more of an "also ran" than anything resembling a leader in the browser market.
Well I think the why is pretty clear with the feature set they have been releasing. On OSX Safari is a default choice whose major advantage is ties with iOS devices. They are fine with people using other browsers and might even welcome a more diverse OSX broswer ecosystem. On iOS they want to move away from the web and towards applications. They need the iOS Safari engine to be fast, but they don't need it to support the full range of web experiences since increasingly they want those experiences delivered via. applications.
The analogy with I.E. is really quite on point. Apple is acting like Microsoft did in the late 1990s / 2000s for the same reason Microsoft was disinterested in I.E. They were focusing on platform specific advantages that come from client / server rather than purely web server design.
LOL - you realize the the original iPhone allowed *only* HTML/JS apps? And there are a lot of limitations in the iOS APIs because they'd prefer you do certain things in browsers where it can follow standards instead of being some developer's hack-up of poor security or poor performance?
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
When Steve Jobs was alive high end Android phones were from a hardware perspective usually quite a bit more advanced than Apple / iOS. Today the opposite is true and high end Android are often quite a bit behind by most metrics. If anything Android has been falling further behind Apple phones since Steve Jobs died.
On OSX Apple was mostly ahead than and is ahead now. How far is Microsoft towards retina only systems? While Apple has converted over most of their major lines and likely around 2017 is selling 0 or very few non retina machines. How far is Microsoft towards taking advantage of SSD and CPU freezing to increase battery life? Etc..
Your estimate is silly.
Just because you no longer use Apple's iOS doesn't mean millions of other people don't still use iOS. There are two kinds of browsers on iOS: browsers that run remotely and behave akin to Remote Desktop, such as Opera Mini, and browsers that wrap the system's UIWebView or WKWebView control, such as Safari. The App Store Review Guidelines forbid third-party web engines that run on an iOS device. This means the vast majority of browsers for iOS are essentially window dressing around Safari.
Linux on PC looks just as shitty as it ever has. Perhaps they've made some progress, but the average user will never see it. It's still a rank puddle of piss that only the super technical use due to it's raw commandline power. Once you eliminate the initial cost to entry, there's zero reason for the average consumer to look at Linux for anything.
Even if Apple is sliding, OS X and Windows are still light years ahead of the dead rotting corpse that is the Linux desktop.
LOL - you realize the the original iPhone allowed *only* HTML/JS apps?
you realize they they ditched that favor of the "app" model?
LOL - you realize the the original iPhone allowed *only* HTML/JS apps?
True, Apple originally planned for the iPhone to use web applications. But it took a long time for Apple to follow through on this plan. For instance, please explain why it took until iOS 6 for HTML/JS apps to access the user's photo and video libraries through an <input type="file"> control and until iOS 8 for HTML/JS apps to put the most basic 3D view on screen (WebGL).
Apple is the new IBM, content only to perform preventive maintenance on their annual upgrade cash machine. Anything that isn't awe-inspiring or scandalous enough to make headlines isn't worth their effort. Fixes to Safari might only add a couple bullet points to their "over 300 improvements" to OS X next year, and that's if they delay all fixes until then just to make them noticeable. The cost-to-benefit ratio is too high for those penny pinchers, so they won't bother.
The Edge Conference, which one can attend by invitation only, includes "delegates" from Google, Mozilla, Facebook, but not from Apple. Many of the web API's unsupported on Safari include functions provided by API's in iOS, or even Android. Some people want to create Web Apps, that create experiences very similar to iOS, but run on a mobile or desktop web browser. Apple would prefer you develop such Apps using iOS using Swift or Objective-C API's, which run natively with better performance in security. Why should Apple support API's on Safari, that allow Web apps to recreate the iOS experience on non-Apple devices? Why do you think Steve Jobs banned JAVA and Adobe Flash from iPhones?
BTW, you can see which web API's are supported on a given web browser by going to http://caniuse.com/
I currently have a web radio transceiver front panel application that works on Linux, Windows, MacOS, Android, Amazon Kindle Fire, under Chrome, Firefox, or Opera. No porting, no software installation. See blog.algoram.com for details of what I'm writing.
The one unsupported popular platform? iOS, because Safari doesn't have the function used to acquire the microphone in the web audio API (and perhaps doesn't have other parts of that API), and Apple insists on handicapping other browsers by forcing them to use Apple's rendering engine.
I don't have any answer other than "don't buy iOS until they fix it".
Bruce Perens.
Well actually it seems to me Chrome itself is the new IE, in that I see more and more websites working on Chrome and maybe IE, but with compatibility issues in Firefox, like menus not working properly. Old IE was too far behind and deviated willfully in non-standard ways. Chrome is so bleeding edge, and web devs are lacking more and more insight into the issue of browser compatibility, that it seems to me we are heading into a whole new era of compatibility hell...
change your slider to view from -1
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
With the question mark it is an implied continuation of the previous question.
Speaking of which, Mr. Grammar Nazi, you forgot your own question mark:
For an example, try loading a publicly hosted URL directly in an HTML view with an app. Oh right, it used to be blocked because its a huge security risk on the level of stupidity that PDF is known for, and it directly duplicates what the browser should be doing. Instead you can use platform APIs to request content for your your view, or use the platform-provided wrapper to display remote content safely - which by necessity require you to build in a more responsible and secure way.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
It always has been a twin to IE. It's a pain in the ass in all ways...and not the good kind.
IMO when jobs came back, thats when i gave up on apple. I was a huge fan in the powerPC days, but since the ipod, it seems they have decided that user lockin is more important than anything else
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Today the opposite is true and high end Android are often quite a bit behind by most metrics.
Citations????
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
We've all been thinking safari is the new ie6 for a while now.
http://www.murga-linux.com/pup...
http://blog.millermedeiros.com...
http://quirksmode.org/html5/in...
http://caniuse.com/#cats=HTML5
Standards - They've supported tons of standards, and all their enterprise/business support tool chains are built up from *NIX libraries. Yes, they layer their own customizations on top (just like everyone else) and yes, these often change between releases without warning (but that's the point about secretive roadmaps).
It's pretty hard to claim that Safari always sucked. Webkit was a fork of KHTML and from day one it was better than any KHTML browser (Konquerer was horrendous!). By limiting the browser to just the standards they quickly got other browser makers to improve their standards support (hey, there's "standards" again!). The only "enterprise-friendly" browser has always been IE, and that's only if you define "enterprise" as "dependent on IE-specific behaviors".
Of all of these, secretive product roadmaps is the only one really at fault for lack of enterprise adoption. Speaking of enterprise adoption, which enterprise companies don't support iOS devices in this day and age?
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
The "Android browser" browser is not Chrome.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Apple has reinvented themselves before and when whatever train they're currently on runs out of steam they'll likely do it again. Back at the introduction of the Macintosh they were about saving users from conformity. Eventually they ended up getting so far in the hole their saving grace came from Microsoft and now it's the complete opposite, conformity and lack of choice is their game.
I have several Apple devices and I NEVER use Safari.
It's really a terrible browser.
What I wonder is why Opera didn't take over by filling the very thing everyone wants, a privacy oriented browser with good features.
It used to be pretty good and I had high hopes.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
This is getting tiring, and along with "walled garden", it is really stale and worn out as an argument. What company (that turns a profit) isn't interested in customer retention? What other products and services are portable in the manner you imply compared to Apple? Jesus, this has been going on for ages with tech. Did your Atari 2600 carts work in that fucking ColecoVision your weirdo friend had? No... they didn't. And that same song continues today.
Beware of the Leopard.
touch response, camera, display quality, battery life per mAh, 64 bit- CPU
HTML5 was supposed to be the be-all and end-all compatability standard that would render all browser differences irrelevant.
Then reality kicked in...
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
When you're describing vendor lock-in, I fail to see how the comparison is not relevant.
They do? Are you high? I just took one of the tracks from that U2 album Apple pushed. Track 6, Volcano. I took that track, an m4a, copied over to a Windows box, and played it in VLC. VLC runs on OS X along with a host of other MP3/media players. So, wtf were you saying??
So no...fine, user lock in without Chrome. Give me a break.
You better keep trying, because your first two sucked ass.
Beware of the Leopard.
When you expect to get most of your revenue from selling apps in the iStore - it's essential that people are unable to get apps for free via fancy web pages.
Hence, iPhone doesn't support WebGL for doing fancy 3D graphics on a web page - if it did, people would write cool games in HTML/JavaScript/WebGL and monetize them directly without having Apple take 30% of the revenue and "approve" their product.
Is this because Apple can't support WebGL? Hell no! The browser actually DOES contain code for WebGL, but it's disabled...UNLESS your web site signs up to display Apple-provided advertising banners...in which case, WebGL works great!
Safari uses the exact same core rending software ("WebKit") as Chrome - so it can trivially support everything that Chrome supports - it's really just a matter of Apple deciding to deliberately cripple the browser to prevent people from providing apps for free.
www.sjbaker.org
Starting a sentence with "surely" to indicate disbelief is asking for confirmation of the statement contained therein.
http://www.englishpractice.com...
But I wasn't the one playing grammar nazi with where question marks were being placed.
The HTML view originally did not allow any remote content loading. This is one of the limitations PhoneGap was originally created for. The "UIWebView" added later essentially embeds a Safari page in your app and prevents a very tidy container to limit how the contents can affect the container app.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Didn't stamp my feet. Pointed out they seemed to be, unreasonably. You just reenforce the point I made.
Which "new technologies" are they behind on exactly again?
Oh I forgot, they are so backwards in officially supporting ad-blockers going forward... hmm all of the sudden the whining about Safari makes so much more $ense now.
You web developers really don't understand where the market is going, do you?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They make hundreds of billions of dollars by selling physical devices to willing customers--it's always been this way.
For a while chrome was better than safari but not any more. Safari consumes much less resources than chrome and it handles multiple tab loads much better on my boxen. The final straw was when chrome deleted every single bookmark during a synch. Lost everything and no way to recover it. I tried restoring a backup but chrome just resynched and erased it again . With safari time machine works beautifully.
My faborite browser is Firefox but that's only because it has the zotero plug in.
This article is total rubbish
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Safari has always been an extremely standards compliant web browser. And Apple is a huge supporter of Webkit which the underlying rendering engine in several other browsers.
You're completely full of shit. You don't like Apple because you don't like Apple customers.
The difference between companies is not in their desire for customer retention but rather how they (try to) do it.
Oddly enough people dislike lock-in and prefer inertial retention and quality services. Not that Apple doesn't do the later but they *do* significantly more of the former than some of the competition, certainly more successfully (people don't care as much about lock-in that doesn't affect a lot of folks).
Last I checked Safari has incredible market share on at least one major mobile platform.
You are obviously a complete and total idiot. Please stop commenting. Ever.
You have been able to load publicly-hosted web-content within an app's UIWebView from the very first day that such views were available in the SDK. That would be iPhoneOS 2.0, for those not familiar with the SDK evolution.
Right. Because Android's toolkits are used on every other platform under the sun.
Windows Phone is probably in a better position in terms of code portability than either iOS or Android, but really UI is so different that having the same toolkit only gets you so far, no matter which platform you're starting from.
It's taken Google until their 13th major release to copy iOS's permissions model. Apple is not afraid of using good ideas, no matter where they originate. Obviously, Google is.
This is getting tiring, and along with "walled garden", it is really stale and worn out as an argument.
If you could install your own browser on iOS, then browsers wouldn't be a problem. Because of the walled garden, you can't.
"Walled garden" isn't a tired argument against iOS, it is a very serious problem, but fanboys would rather ignore it or call it 'worn out.' In reality it sucks and there's no need for it, and plenty of reasons to not have it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You seem really angry.
Please point out the "good" Android phones available in August 2007.
That's OK. Apparently you've also given up on intelligence and knowledge.
It was under Jobs that Apple moved to "the" standard PC platform -- Intel.
The iPod always supported media from any source; iTunes (Store) was not even available at launch.
OS X has always supported 3rd-party development, and Xcode has been freely-available for roughly forever. You've also never been tied to Xcode for development on that platform.
The only way Apple locks you in is by not being Microsoft (Windows) or Google (Android). That means nothing to anyone that has a working mind.
Apple does not force you to use iTunes unless you have an iDevice, and increasingly, even that is not true. You can do almost everything from the device itself these days.
You could use Chrome if you wanted to. I think you'll have to build it yourself, though.
Please find something that you are not allowed to do on OS X that you are allowed on other OSes. Technical limitations are technical limitations, and do not count (e.g. no DirectX). Other Mobile OSes have limitations too, though Android seems to have very few.
In short: you're still an ignorant moron who hates because Apple.
You are simply an ignorant fuck. Find one thing that only Apple does that both qualifies as vendor lock-in and that is not intended to improve quality for the user.
Apple doesn't care. That's not the same as "not knowing". Get real. Apple is a huge company, both in financial terms and in number of employees. Do you really think they don't know what an "Enterprise" needs in terms of IT support?
A better question is is Apple the new Microsoft? Or the old Apple, for that matter. Of course Microsoft is still the old Microsoft.
Now that The Man is gone, and forever this time, upper management will move back to the non-innovating, don't shake the tree types waiting for their stock options or golden parachutes to kick in. A Confederacy of Do-Nothings.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
while safari still works fine as a browser. it might be behind in standards, etc. but that's not something the end user sees, as long as it works as intended - as it does. it's still a far cry from the days of ie4-6 which was a nightmare to use, horrible slow, lacked a lot of the useful features the competition had (tabs!) and was prone to collect malware.
Apple does not force you to use iTunes unless you have an iDevice, and increasingly, even that is not true.
Can I buy music from the iTunes store without installing the iTunes software?
That's not a rhetorical question: I would like to buy something that is only available there, but there is no Linux version of iTunes.
As opposed to you posting an opinion on someone else's blog.
Cool story 'bro...
I agree, Safari is faster and more stable than any other browser on Mac OS X.
And yet I own a couple of macs but use Firefox instead. Why? Safari breaks oddly on certain websites I frequent, it lacks privacy add-ons I consider essential, it simply isn't available on linux and the Windows version is flaky in my experience. Plus (totally personal preference) I don't especially care for some of the interface choices. I use it some but primarily I don't bother unless I'm using an iPhone or iPad where there are no other practical options. Apple's applications in my experience rarely push the envelope and Safari seems to be no exception. It's a pretty basic webkit based browser with nothing to particularly recommend it over the alternatives. Works ok but not great and has no special features I care about.
Chrome I find to be like constantly beta testing a product. Google is constantly changing and often breaking things which I find VERY annoying. IE has made great strides but it's still IE and not available on a Mac or Linux so I really don't bother with it unless I'm dealing with a website that can't handle one of the other browsers for some reason. (which shockingly still happens now and then)
As for speed and stability I haven't found it to be any better or worse than the others. I use all the major browsers at least some of the time and all are generally stable and I cannot objectively see a speed difference between them during normal use. If there is a difference it is so small as to be inconsequential.
This is why Apple is dead in the enterprise.
You say that as if Apple cares. Apple has pretty much never really cared about enterprise customers. They are high volume, low margin customers who don't give a shit about the things that actually make Apple's products different (software mostly) and certainly won't pay for them. Apple really has little to gain from getting into the enterprise business in a big way. If you want to see what would happen to Apple if they got into enterprise products look at the profit margins for HP (around 5%) versus Apple (around 25%). Anyone who thinks Apple should get into enterprise needs to first explain how Apple would do that without crushing their profit margins.
He didn't say the Android Browser, he said the default Android browser.
In newer versions of Android, you don't get the old Android stock browser. It was the default in the past, but hasn't been so for a long time now, and isn't even available unless you run hacks to install it and its dependencies.
That may be, but just as myself on my 5 family iOS gadgets, everybody I know uses Chrome
You must not know many people since Apple sold 74 million iPhones and 21 million iPads in the first quarter of 2015 alone. I see plenty of Android out there but the only way you won't see iOS devices is if you have your head in the sand.
I still have a copy of the installation file, its version is 5.1. I still use that version to test my stuff because I can not afford a Mac (it helps that I also need to support IE9 so I can't use the newer stuff anyway).Apple discontinued Safari for windows years ago, honestly I don't know if they simply don't care about the web or if they are trying to actually undermine it to promote native apps.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Kill yourself, you worthless piece of shit.
Caring this much isn't cool. At all. ;)
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
myself on my 5 family iOS gadgets, everybody I know uses Chrome
holy shit, we got a bad ass here!
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
It won't catch on. No time for commercial ads.
Oh, I'm sure FIFA willl get round to fucking it up with breaks every quarter of an hour, time outs etc if it ever really takes off in the US.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
hint: Chrome (or any browser* on iOS) is little more than a skin over Mobile Safari (=webkit). sure, sometimes the skin is useful, but iOS Chrome is actually more like "Safari with some Chrome-ish Extensions".
*: at least any browser on the App Store; Apple literally won't allow any other renderers. maybe there are homebrew browsers for jailbroken iOS. i don't know.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
What world are you posting this from?!
OP appears to be proof of the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum physics, as it's hard to believe it originated from our universe.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You don't like Apple because you don't like Apple customers.
You say that as though it's not a good enough reason.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Except we're talking about technology baselines for the web browser. Which is very very different from user features like Siri or on-screen-multitasking that in no way impact (web)app development.
No, because if it was then all government websites would require users to use Safari to access them. On OSX only, too.
I still have a copy of the installation file, its version is 5.2.3. Microsoft gave up on it in 2003.
I wish Apple would have at least matched their last Safari version number to it. :)
In Canada we still get Android devices with old versions of Android, so people still get brand-new devices with that old piece of crap "Android browser".
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
What an idiotic comment. Even more so, when coming from supposed professionals.
Unlike iE, Safari has followed web standards from day one. Unlike Microsoft, Apple didn't think that it was a good idea to integrate itself tightly into the OS, right down to the kernel, making it a shocking security nightmare.
Apple didn't have to throw out their entire software line and create a new browser from scratch cause they fucked the old one up so badly that it was irredeemable.
This kind of hyperbolic nonsense not only confuses the issue, it minimizes the damage that Microsoft caused, setting web development back by a good decade.
But surely iOS users don't all stick to Safari. Safari came with my work Mac, but nevertheless, I use Chrome. Why wouldn't other people do that? Just because someone blunders into the Apple Trap doesn't mean they all have to drink all the Apple koolaide, does it?
uhhhh, I think that was kind of the point of the title of article. You didn't even have to RTFA ,just understand the title.
You know how Internet Explorer came with Windows but people would install other browsers like Netscape?
There are good reasons for the walled garden, although they don't tend to apply to the Slashdot crowd.
The walled garden is a large whitelist of programs that have been checked for malware. It isn't perfect, but it keeps malware off iDevices pretty effectively. If there was some official way to sideload, people would do that, and wind up with malware on their iDevices. It also ensures that all apps on iDevices adhere to the UI guidelines, giving a fairly consistent experience. This means that the iDevice experience remains consistent and safe.
Realistically, most people don't have much hope of staying malware-free if they can pick their own programs to run from the general jungle. Slashdotters tend to think they can, although some of that is likely overconfidence. Slashdotters also tend not to care about UI as much.
So, what are the reasons against it? I understand the ideology here, and rather approve of it, but it isn't important outside geekdom, and most of Apple's customers aren't geeks. There are things I could do with sideloaded software on my iPhone, but nothing I really care about. If I want to do significant things, I use my laptop or desktop, because they're much better suited for serious work.
An iDevice is a very powerful tool and toy. It isn't as powerful as it could be, but because of that it can make assurances that Android can't.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Apple is also heavily about the experience. If somebody uses an iPad at work, and it's locked down to only use clumsy software, that person is not going to be happy with the iPad and is less likely to buy one personally. The financial risk isn't a problem for Apple, but there's other reasons why Apple will serve the enterprise last.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
You also get regularly raped by moose. I do not see this as a good thing.
(Canadian citizen - First Nations heritage law, and Canadian property owner - I get raped by moose regularly and I like it.)
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
What is bothersome is that we need to recode for Firefox. What the hell? I thought we were supposed to be done with that crap now that IE is almost an acceptable browser. Well, no, it is an acceptable browser but I still can not go back to using it. I can not adapt to the UI very well even though it was my default Windows' web browser for years, I just can not revert to it. I am an Opera user and I am on the beta side and the beta dev browser side - I manage to adapt to those changes (except I hate the disappearing/moving features - a lot) without much trouble at all but I just can not seem to adapt to using IE again and it is not for lack of trying. I have even forced myself to boot to Windows and use it for a whole week at a time. I managed but it was uncomfortable.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Not half of the OS market. Half of the mobile OS market. Globally, it has around 15% of the smartphone market share.
You do realize the ditched it because the developers all screamed "WEB APPS SUCK!!"
That likely was part of it but you're not going to tell me you actually believe the whole iOS App Store ecosystem was just a side-effect of "web apps suck" are you?
Interesting. I'm neither Canadian nor a victim of moose-rape, but a moose did bite my sister once...
I thought they ended when Woz left.
Maybe now, but not always. Steve Wozniak was a groundbreaker, and put Apple ahead in substance. Jobs was too focused on style, which is pretty much the only thing Macs still have going for them.
Wow, awesome points! I hadn't considered it that way, but it makes perfect sense. Enterprise systems require a depth of configurability/customizability that Apple flat out rejects despite their pretense of individuality. They don't do flexibility, and from an enterprise IT standpoint, that's not good. Not so good at security either.
Those are lousy reasons to take away someone's freedom. The walled garden hasn't kept malware off devices, and Android has shown you can get all the benefits of the walled garden without giving up the freedom.
There are always more people who will try to take control of your device if they can. We've seen this play out before with Microsoft Palladium....first being a way to ensure you had legal copies of windows, then expanding to mean you could only play media approved by the RIAA/MPAA etc. Fortunately it got dropped back then.
Even in this story we have a story where Apple is censoring software (alternate browsers), making the lives of their users worse.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Well, I don't give a rats ass which browser is Hip or supported or what the fook. If it loads all my web pages quickly and doesn't crash, like Chrome used to do, then that's fine. Unfortunately, since I don't know how to turn off automatic updates on chrome, I've been stuck with the crashy, increasingly incompatible builds, with that horrible bookmark manager that I luckily managed to revert back, for the moment, untiil they block that option too.. I DREAD the day that I am going to have to switch back to Safari on my Mac. At least I still have Torchbrowser (Chrome, really), which never gets updated anymore so no new buggy builds ...
Well, enterprises don't want to pay 50% or more for comparable hardware on the basis of aesthetics.
People don't pay more for Apples devices because of the aesthetics - not much anyway. They're nice and all but what people really are paying for is the software. Apple at it's core is a software company. If you put Windows on a Mac or Android on an iPhone (easily done) you'd have no idea if it was made by Apple or Dell unless you looked at the logo. Apple doesn't make their own hardware but they do make their own software and that is what people pay extra for. Their hardware is nice but nothing really special. They just won't sell you their software (usually) unless it is attached to a piece of hardware.
Don't believe me that Apple is a software company? Here's Steve Jobs himself saying so.
Apple does make servers, nobody wants them.
They've made a number of half hearted stabs at making servers over the years but they've never really been serious about it.
Well, I agree with a large part of what you're saying, but you aren't factoring in the hardware design.
Sure I am. Other companies sell hardware that is comparably nice and that if you sold a Macbook Air with Windows on it that nobody would pay extra for it compared to equivalent Dell or HP units. There are Android phones that are just as nicely designed as the iPhone or at least near enough as makes no difference. I've seen laptops that are just as nice as the Macbook Air. The nice hardware is really just a form of marketing. Make no mistake, it's very nice and it no doubt contributes measurably to Apple's success but it isn't the core reason why people buy Apple products.
What makes a Mac special is OS X. What makes an iPhone special is iOS. Take those away and you'll see Apple's profit margins evaporate faster than you can say "shareholder lawsuit".
Stay the hell out off Canada. The moose are perverts.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
So perhaps then it isn't the design of the software or the hardware, but the overall aesthetic. Both the Air and OSX are "pretty", but lacking in functionality.
OS X is basically a riff on BSD unix underneath. It's roughly as capable as any other version of unix so I'm not sure why you think that. OS X on the Macbook Air is the same as any other Mac. You can argue that you don't like Apple's operating systems and I wouldn't quibble but to say the software lacks functionality is just false.
If you don't like the hardware on the Air, I get that. It's necessarily a design with some tradeoffs that don't work for everyone. When you go as light as possible you have to leave some stuff behind. But that gets back to my point which is that Apple is really a software company. They put the software in a pretty box but (almost) nobody would give a shit if it ran Windows instead of OS X.
There's also an (undeserved) reputation for ease of use to consider, which ties back into the lack of functionality/flexibility.
Disagree that Apple's products haven't earned their reputation for ease of use. I've used Apple products on and off since the early 1980s and I've spent even more time with their competitor's products. As a general rule Apple products tend to be easier to teach to the technologically impaired, require less support and generally work more consistently and with less fuss than the competition. There are exceptions of course but on average it's usually true. That's not to say their products are perfect by any means. But having used, watched and supported others I have to say that the evidence largely points to Apple products being above average in ease of use.
When someone who is not a geek asks me whether to get a mac versus a PC or iPhone versus Android, I usually point them at the Apple product (budget permitting) because it will be less painful for them 95 times out of 100. When I converted my parents over to a Mac and iPad from Windows machines the number of tech support calls I got went from 1-3/month to 1-2/year. Furthermore if you live vaguely close to an Apple store it's a LOT easier to get support for a Mac than for most PCs.