In Web 2.0 terms, which I'm sure is all Steve really cares about, Firefox has 75% of the market and Safari only 25%. Of course he wants to go after the Firefox user. They should be flattered, they are already hip to Web 2.0 even at this early date, they are in the game. It's actually a show of respect to dis Firefox in this case.
In Web 2.0, Microsoft has 0% market share now and no active Web 2.0 browser project in development. They are stuck on the PC where they trapped themselves. If all the phones in the world today had Web browsers, IE Windows would be 18% of the Web. That's not enough to be non-standard. Five years from now, that is the situation on the Web.
Bill Gates vision was you are going to retire your CD player and replace it with a Windows PC. Then your VCR goes, in goes another Windows PC. In your car, the stereo is out, put in a Windows PC. Get one for your fridge. This is clearly not how it turned out. Specialize devices are merely being replaced by newer specialized devices with computers in them, requiring much design and invention. And devices are getting smaller, so that you replace the "home stereo" with a pocket stereo and use it either at home or away, not a Windows PC. Microsoft has been caught totally flat-footed by all of this.
> And if you think Apple doesn't get bashed for user interface decisions by Mac users, you haven't been paying attention.
One of the "features" of Leopard is "consistent look"... dropping the other interface styles and keeping dark gray. People cheered for this at WWDC. There is a blog where "an anthropomorphized brushed metal interface" is taken down to the basement of 1 Infinite Loop and shot. Mac users are crazy about this stuff. It looks like Leopard will be consistent.
However we can't say the same thing about Vista. It has two independent looks depending on which version of it you're running. XP also has two more. So since Safari for Windows runs on all of those systems, what would be required is for Apple to make 4 interfaces to replace the one they already have that ties to their own look. And these are free apps. That is bullshit, actually. Especially when Apple's look is much better than any of Windows' looks.
Safari on Windows brought its own font-rendering. You can't tell one from the other. There are side-by-sides around the Web from people running both Safaris in their own Window on the Mac Desktop, and the only thing different is the chrome. The WebKit view is the same.
A future iTunes for Windows will do the same thing, no doubt.
The author of the source article is confused. He thinks he has to press "Control" while pressing Enter but you don't. Just Enter will do. If you press Control+Enter Safari does nothing.
You can just type "sony" and Return into Safari's address bar and it will go "http://sony.com/" for you. You don't have to add some secret magical shortcut.
> Basically all Adobe/Macromedia products do not follow any Windows convention at all. Am I the only Windows user > that is horribly frustrated by this?
There are no Windows conventions. Or to be more precise: the Windows convention is every app for itself.
In Windows 95, Microsoft themselves replaced the cut, copy, paste shortcuts they stole from WordPerfect with ones stolen from the Mac. People lost their fucking minds over it, but Microsoft said don't worry, the old ones are also there!
On the Mac, Apple did the work of defining some conventions, and over the next 20+ years, various third-party apps have added conventions that stuck. This actually creates a "wrong" way of doing things. As right as it is to put "Find" on Command+F it is wrong to put it on Command+K which used to be whatever the app likes but now it is almost always "Konnect". If your app says K is for Find I have 50 other apps that say you're wrong. On Windows it would be hard to muster such a jury.
With Adobe apps you are using desktop publishing conventions, not Mac conventions per se, but it's the same heritage. If it helps any, Mac users complain that each new Adobe revision is too Windows-like also.
> You see, every Mac user gets all whiny when an applicaton is merely 'ported' to their platform without taking into consideration > the 'unique nature of the Mac'.
No, we don't get whiny, we just don't use the app. It's less about looks and more about functionality. There are a lot of things that have been the same way for over 20 years straight in the Mac interface, so if you want to use a different shortcut for Find then everybody else you're going to hear about it. That stuff belongs to the user, not the app developer. This isn't Bill Gates personal software enthusiasts club.
The thing is, I want to go along with your argument, but when I went and looked at what a Windows app is "supposed" to look like I found out that Vista has two entirely different looks, and XP adds at least one more. So what you're arguing is that in order to release Safari on Windows, instead of porting the UI from the Mac with it's "Apple" look now thanks to iTunes, they should have built 3-4 separate UI's in various Microsoft styles and maybe show 4-5 different Safari looks in the documentation just to make sure the user can recognize their freaking Web browser?
The fact that you can ask 5 people how Safari for Windows is advantageous to Apple and get 5 different responses, all positive, probably means it is advantageous to Apple in at least a couple of ways.
> How embarrassing to release a browser that has to have six patches on its first freaking release day.
The reason is all secrecy. WebKit is an open source project, so for example the Mac build of Safari v3 had dailies going back a long way and much QA. The Windows version was in a vault. The day of the announcement Dave Hyatt (lead Safari developer) was calling for Windows QA people to apply at Apple on his blog.
So anyway, I'm saying that whenever Safari for Windows FIRST shipped, it was going to be raw. However it will get better faster and the flaws are in the browser chrome not the core engine.
> Yes you can remove IE completely but MS apps that require IE to render HTML internally won't work if you do it.
That is the whole problem. The Internet Explorer application is artificially tied into the operating system. You cannot remove it without damaging the system.
The reason to say "artificially tied" is that core services are not applications and vice versa. By technical definition. The part of IE which the user may choose not to use (the browsing application, there are many of these, there is a market, the user chooses them at a level above the operating system) is not separate from the part of IE that belongs in the system (the rendering engine and other core services). It is basic software architecture being violated by Microsoft in order to keep the Windows user using IE. That is the only purpose.
On the Mac, you can drag and drop Safari to the Trash and flush and you have not affected the operating system at all. Which is good because mail clients, RSS readers, the Help Viewer, iTunes, third-party browsers, and many other apps all use the system's core services.
> Nobody forces you to IE
Definitely not. Nobody forces you to use Windows either. But if you use Windows, Microsoft has taken many steps to keep IE on your computer for some unstated reason, even if you have three other favorite browsers and don't want a fourth on your computer.
There is no technical way to defend the HTML rendering being in an app. There never was, but it's even worse now. The late 90's vision of the Web was that you would run thousands of apps in your browser and so never need another non-browser app. At least with that in mind you can see what Microsoft's madness initially was. However now we see that the Web is just one application of the Internet. It is the one that specifically attempts to be universal, so it is important, but at the same time, because it is universal, the pace of change is fucking glacial. If Apple waited until iTunes could run in a browser we would have quantum iPods with no music on them. Instead of the Netscape vision of every app is a Web app, we have more like the Sun vision of the network is the computer. In this model, you don't mind to have a separate RSS reader for news feed junkies, you have a Wi-Fi VOIP phone, you have blogging tools, IM. There are even Web sites such as Twitter that then became native apps (Twitterific I think), escaping the Web entirely to run on the bare Internet.
If you use a Mac for 20 minutes you'll notice the Web browser is just one thing out of dozens. Lots of people know this now. The bizarre argument that putting IE in the trash destroys MSHTML.dll for some pre-ordained reason it is foolish to even contemplate it.
> I believe bootcamp has had a significant impact on mac purchases. I bought a Mac because of it.
Apple specifically went after you guys. What better people to sell "Intel" to?
At the beginning of each transition Apple needs to get a bunch of new users to offset current users who dig-in with their old stuff and wait out the transition. The Unix people kept hardware sales up in the first year or two of Mac OS X because it wasn't until then that a Mac user could really use Mac OS X. And anyone with a Tiger G5 when the Intel announcement happened had zero interest in a Tiger Intel Rosetta combo. Much better to sell that Core Duo sandwich to someone who is already shopping for Core Duos.
There is more than one way to get through the transition. The obvious way is to change PowerPC to Intel and keep Mac OS X and your apps the same, but the other way is to go HP to Apple and keep Windows and your apps the same. Either way, you will all almost certainly be running Leopard on your next machines, it will be in full swing by then, very hard to resist for yesterday's Windows, especially if you can have yesterday's Windows in a box anyway. Parallels is like $50, that is less than anti-virus.
> Microsoft has got the same crap for doing bad ports for Apple.
All of Microsoft's Mac products STARTED on the Mac, except for Internet Explorer, which on the Mac was an entirely different product, other than the name it started there also.
Windows users can't complain about Safari not matching Windows, there has not been a version of Windows that had one look of its own since 2000. XP and Vista both have two entirely different GUI looks.
On the Mac, when you take the computer out of the box, it already has one of every kind of software on it. A third-party solution has to be better than what's included on the Mac before the user even considers buying it. For example, there is no Photoshop Album for Mac because we ALL have iPhoto, there is no need.
> Yes but phones have already dropped through the price barrier.
No, phones right now are exactly where MP3 players were in 2001 when Apple released the iPod. There are cheap ones, and there are expensive ones, but there aren't any that don't suck. Most have the UI from a pocket calculator from the 1970's.
I had an MP3 player in 1999 that was "consumer-priced" at $149 but it could only hold half a CD and it took a half hour to get that on there. I was happy to pay $399 for an iPod two years later.
It's not just price, you have to make it work if you expect people to choose these things for themselves. It's not I-T where there is a conspiracy of sleazy business people who think they are smart about technology and buy all Microsoft products and dole them out to their workers.
> Microsoft heavily promoted WMA as an alternate audio format, mostly because they owned it. The fact that it was DRM capable, > and so the RIAA would like it was just icing.
No, you are wrong.
Microsoft cloned MP3 as its own WMA format, just as they have with many formats, many times before. For example, the AIFF raw audio format from the Mac with some new headers: WAV. If you doubt WMA is a clone of MP3, I have only to point out that a) Microsoft is not an audio company, for them to suddenly start competing with Dolby and Fraunhofer overnight seemed pretty magical at the time, and b) Microsoft just paid billions of dollars to Fraunhofer after losing a court case where a JUDGE (not an I-T person) looked at the underlying technology in WMA and MP3 and found it to be such a complete rip-off hat he ordered Microsoft to pay licensing fees to Fraunhofer. All WMA's are licensed by Fraunhofer, creator of MP3. All of them, worldwide.
Microsoft specifically tried to get WMA into every place music is stored, along with its content tax, where the creator of the content has to pay Microsoft a set amount per copy sold, and they actually managed to get into the DVD-Audio spec for a couple of years. The idea was that you would buy an audio DVD with 24-bit hi-res audio for home listening, but on the DVD-ROM would be a JUKEBOX folder with WMA in it, which your PC would copy to your Windows Media capable music player. After the iPod hit, this was changed to MPEG-4 AAC but DVD-Audio is dead anyway.
The coders at Microsoft are all that I-T people think of, but the coders are just there to create stuff that has already been sold. The real heart of Microsoft is their business dealings. What are they famous for? Fucking IBM in the mouth at the height of their power. That is where there muscle is.
So you prefer to think that Microsoft just happened to accidentally invent WMA and then they said "here, world, you need an alternative audio format" but the fact is that WMA exists only and solely to lock-in the music industry to a Microsoft "vig". Vig is an interesting word that extortionists use and which you will find thousands upon thousands of times in any record of Microsoft's internal correspondence. It is what they are all about: a vig with every PC, a vig with every music album, a vig with every banking transaction, just sit back and watch the money roll in while others work and build. That's what they do, it's all they do.
That is ridiculous. Explorer doesn't support any of the CSS specifications fully, not even v1, and cannot pass any of the Acid tests, not even the first one.
Safari passes both Acid tests, even Firefox can't do the second one yet. The Acid tests are made to represent the stuff people actually use in their coding.
I can just as easily remind you that only Safari is rendering text-shadow, that is more useful than text-transform and text-variant by a long shot, not just for drop shadows (an actual style thing) but for inset text, that looks like it's cut into the background.
Firefox is behind Safari in some ways, specifically styles and typography. I'm sure Apple wants iPhone developers to use those features in their apps. For example, Firefox does not support CSS text-shadow, that is used not only to make drop shadows on text but also to make it appear to be inset, cut into the background.
However the main reason for Safari coming to Windows is that there are only two Web 2.0 browsers in the world and Safari is one of them, Firefox is the other. Expect to see Safari 3 and Firefox 3 on a lot of devices, that is all we got. Users will need one or the other as they go forward with the Web, and having both is much better than either one alone.
Internet Explorer only runs on Windows PC's... that is a small minority of the world's Web-capable devices. Phones outnumber PC's today by 4:1 it will get worse for the PC. Safari and Firefox will enable the PC to keep up with Web 2.0.
> I'm very skeptical that millions of people are going to download a different browser for their desktop in order to be compatible with their phone.
They won't have to download, it comes with. It's on the iPhone disc.
The reason people need it is because after you see how good the Web looks in Safari it's hard to go back to IE. It's like after you get a laser printer it's hard to go back to dot-matrix.
> Why would iPhone Web 2.0 developers be so short-sighted as to demand that their clients install a special browser on their desktops to access their apps.
Why would iPhone Web 2.0 developers do 150% more development work in order to support Explorer for Windows when it is neither a Web 2.0 browser nor a mobile browser? How many WML sites work in IE? What is the point of that?
Many are complaining that they can't make native iPhone apps. I don't see those people working for one month to make a killer iPhone app and then they go "wait, don't release it, lets work for 3 months more and get it running badly in Explorer."
> What makes you think that they will have that kind of market clout.
Microsoft has zero market share in Web 2.0. Additionally, they have zero market share in mobile Web 2.0.
Safari and Firefox are the Coke and Pepsi of Web 2.0 on the Desktop. Safari is in 3 beta, and Firefox will ship 3 soon. Microsoft has not shipped v1 of it's Web 2.0 browser. Even as big as they are, they can't catch up, it takes years to get your browser as mature as Firefox and Safari are right now.
Safari v3 for Windows is the very first beta of that browser on a new platform, yet it is over twice as fast as IE v7. That is only going to get worse, there are no 100000 GHz chips coming to fix that, you cannot port IE v7 from Windows to a phone and expect it to get faster. There is no there there with IE Windows. Parts of it are fused into Windows, parts of it are broken, parts of it are deliberately incompatible with Web 1.0 and parts are deliberately incompatible with Web 2.0. They don't have an asset to get into this game with.
There are 2 billion phones right now and only a quarter of that many PC's. Right now, though, the Web is on PC's and not on phones, in spite of the phones having always-on network connections and the computing power of a 1997 workstation. This situation is being rectified right now but not by Microsoft. Their actions have shut the Web out of phones, confined it to the PC, because Microsoft is irrelevant on the phones. Not only do they not have market share of any kind, they don't have TECHNOLOGY. They don't have the ability to make consumer products, they don't have any consumer customers, they don't have brand loyalty or even a good reputation.
All multimedia on Windows has always required QuickTime.
Today it is an MPEG-4 AAC audio file, 10 years ago it was a CD-ROM.
Microsoft has never built the equivalent layer for Windows. They sometimes build some of it, but within a few years that is gone and they have something else.
There are no standard codecs in Windows, there is no standard architecture for media. To bring iTunes to Windows AT THE BRAYING REQUEST OF WINDOWS USERS Apple had to bring some infrastructure also.
If you have a complaint about it, you really should just uninstall all your Apple software and use Windows Media Player and a Zune. That is available.
> 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.
Imagine two ads for two competing phones:
- jPhone runs calculators, poker games, memory managers, PIM's, an IDE - iPhone runs MySpace, Flickr, Twitter, eBay, Yahoo, Slashdot
Which do you really think will succeed in the consumer market?
How many people who are reading this right now would trade one of their phone's third-party apps for a desktop level browser that can run Slashdot without any compromises?
The reason the "calculator" app is such a staple of phones is that they are all pocket calculators with phones built-in. With the iPhone it is an iPod with phone built in. The apps you want are of a different nature also.
> force people to download Safari in order to get iTunes (the way he forces them to download Quicktime)
First, nobody is forced to download iTunes. If you have seen such a case you should call the cops.
Second, the reason Windows users have to download QuickTime today is the same exact reason they had to do it 10 years ago: Windows lacks a modern media architecture. There is not even an MPEG-4 decoder in Windows, that has been ISO standard and the standard of the music and video industry since 2002.
Third, MPEG-4 is the international standardization of the QuickTime file format. Instead of basing iTunes and iPod around MPEG-4, Apple could easily have just used QuickTIme. The only difference to the user would be the change of the ".m4a" and ".m4v" file name endings to ".mov" other than that nobody would notice. In fact, Apple would be able to offer even richer multimedia in iTunes, MPEG-4 is still a step behind.
So in short, all of your haughty attitude is bullshit. Not only is Apple not engaged in some malfeasance, they have specifically resisted malfeasances that no other computer industry organization would resist, because they know that doesn't fly in consumer electronics. Even Sony could never get their own music format going and they own a record company.
Any help that Windows users get from the future is only going to help them.
Also it is pretty well known that the first 5 million iPhones were made by one Asian supplier, and the second 5 million were recently ordered at another supplier. The second ones are supposed to be 3G European iPhones.
> Redefining "Open" are we? Yes, Apple is a licensor of the patented AAC algorithms.
No, you are redefining "open" to go along with your narrow view of the I-T industry and the current debate over software patents.
The reality is that it means different things in different industries. Very few people in the world care about patents. That is only 25 years. In music, the CD is almost 30 and copyright lasts 95 years after you're dead.
In music codecs, there are three points at which you can charge money in order to support the development of the codec:
1) the encoder - you charge $x per encoder shipped 2) the player - you charge $x per player shipped 3) the content - you charge $x per copy of content shipped or served
The third rail of this is #3. Software people always try to get a content tax with each new generation, and they never get it, but they never stop trying. For example, the content tax is the foundation of Microsoft's business model, therefore their encoder is free to use and player is free to use. But nobody in music is ever going to use it because it means hiring an accountant to count all of your copies of content and keep sending Microsoft money and one day they will show up with lawyers and want to look at your books anyway, like the BSA thing. Even with the CD many artists never made any money, why would we want to sell a point to Microsoft?
With MPEG-4, there was a content tax initially, until Steve Jobs told MPEG-4 to drop it or forget about being part of QuickTime and they dropped it immediately and the rest is history.
Charging at the player, #2 above, is also not feasible because all that leads to is the cheapest players lacking various codecs. You give the player manufacturer a financial incentive to be non-standard. That is how you could end up with a situation where every Chinese media player won't play MPEG-4, opting instead for free decoders and let the music industry sort it out, the player is already sold. This leads to frustration for the listener, who is the point of this whole thing. If we involve them in the production we have lost, we have abrogated our responsibility to them to create a functional music playback system.
That leaves charging for the encoder. That is how we do it in music and video. We like it that way. It costs me $29 every other year for my 200 encoders it is a very minimal expense. At a penny a track content tax (which is low for Microsoft) all I have to do is sell 2900 copies of a single track to break even on all of my encoders. I probably pay more per year for the computer screen cleaning kit that I use. That is why software people want the content tax. They see irresistible dollar signs as their library of taxable content grows. As usual, Microsoft wants to fix something that's not broken. As usual, with Ogg, Linux wants to help break it.
The reason I get pissed off when I hear somebody push Ogg or some other "totally free" encoder/decoder solution is that if the entire music industry moved to Ogg (if we could put up with the reduction in sound quality for the whole human race) then we would have a couple of years of sub-standard but totally free encoding and decoding before "Ogg 2 now with content tax" because we have to support the heroic coders who selflessly make Ogg better for the benefit of humanity and it's not too much to ask to get a penny a track when you are writing code that will make every song sound better. No.
One reason the music industry didn't "get" MP3 was because we already knew what it was, the shitty sounding soundtrack from a DVD. MP3 has specific problems that make it unsuitable for music playback. With AAC, it was designed by Dolby to be good to music also, and to even fit under 64 kbit/s for the Internet with dropping below CD sample rate, it is custom made for me and everyone else like me because it's what we asked Dolby for like 10 years ago. At this point if you are talking audio codecs you should read the history at least. You're not going to change MPEG at this point, it's working too well.
> I can't speak for the US, but here in the UK, if you don't have 3G then you're never going anywhere with giving the user a decent browsing > experience. Speaking only about browsing, Apple will be behind the game even before they've launched.
That is a geek perspective, I'm sorry but it is not going to translate to consumers. Geeks know about bandwidth, consumers just wait for the page to load, that is the fact. And on the other hand, geeks will put up with no CSS or a 1994 view of the Web, while consumers think that is broken. That is not the Internet to them, that is not the Web.
If you A-B an iPhone on a 56k dial-up connection next to your rig on a T1 the consumer will take the iPhone every time because it runs the real Flickr slowly instead of a faux-Flickr at regular speeds. It runs the real MySpace and the real eBay and on and on and on.
Also, it's important to note that the iPhone cell connection is its SECONDARY DATA CONNECTION. It's primary data connection is Wi-Fi "n". It's 1/8th the real world speed of Gigabit Ethernet. Most consumers have NEVER surfed the Web that fast. The typical home or office connection is much slower.
Finally, with Ajax programming, the only "page load" is the initial HTML page, while you build a DOM tree. If your browser has Ajax (like iPhone, unlike that relic you're carrying around) then the page load is SNAP! and then you start loading in content in the background, and you use subtle animations to hide download times, you load slideshows a few photos ahead so that when it is time to show the user a photo, it is just SNAP! the photo has been on the device for like 20 seconds already, you build up a time lag, you play psychological games on the user to convince them the content is already on their device.
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In Web 2.0 terms, which I'm sure is all Steve really cares about, Firefox has 75% of the market and Safari only 25%. Of course he wants to go after the Firefox user. They should be flattered, they are already hip to Web 2.0 even at this early date, they are in the game. It's actually a show of respect to dis Firefox in this case.
In Web 2.0, Microsoft has 0% market share now and no active Web 2.0 browser project in development. They are stuck on the PC where they trapped themselves. If all the phones in the world today had Web browsers, IE Windows would be 18% of the Web. That's not enough to be non-standard. Five years from now, that is the situation on the Web.
Bill Gates vision was you are going to retire your CD player and replace it with a Windows PC. Then your VCR goes, in goes another Windows PC. In your car, the stereo is out, put in a Windows PC. Get one for your fridge. This is clearly not how it turned out. Specialize devices are merely being replaced by newer specialized devices with computers in them, requiring much design and invention. And devices are getting smaller, so that you replace the "home stereo" with a pocket stereo and use it either at home or away, not a Windows PC. Microsoft has been caught totally flat-footed by all of this.
> And if you think Apple doesn't get bashed for user interface decisions by Mac users, you haven't been paying attention.
... dropping the other interface styles and keeping dark gray. People cheered for this at WWDC. There is a blog where "an anthropomorphized brushed metal interface" is taken down to the basement of 1 Infinite Loop and shot. Mac users are crazy about this stuff. It looks like Leopard will be consistent.
One of the "features" of Leopard is "consistent look"
However we can't say the same thing about Vista. It has two independent looks depending on which version of it you're running. XP also has two more. So since Safari for Windows runs on all of those systems, what would be required is for Apple to make 4 interfaces to replace the one they already have that ties to their own look. And these are free apps. That is bullshit, actually. Especially when Apple's look is much better than any of Windows' looks.
Safari on Windows brought its own font-rendering. You can't tell one from the other. There are side-by-sides around the Web from people running both Safaris in their own Window on the Mac Desktop, and the only thing different is the chrome. The WebKit view is the same.
A future iTunes for Windows will do the same thing, no doubt.
The author of the source article is confused. He thinks he has to press "Control" while pressing Enter but you don't. Just Enter will do. If you press Control+Enter Safari does nothing.
You can just type "sony" and Return into Safari's address bar and it will go "http://sony.com/" for you. You don't have to add some secret magical shortcut.
> Basically all Adobe/Macromedia products do not follow any Windows convention at all. Am I the only Windows user
> that is horribly frustrated by this?
There are no Windows conventions. Or to be more precise: the Windows convention is every app for itself.
In Windows 95, Microsoft themselves replaced the cut, copy, paste shortcuts they stole from WordPerfect with ones stolen from the Mac. People lost their fucking minds over it, but Microsoft said don't worry, the old ones are also there!
On the Mac, Apple did the work of defining some conventions, and over the next 20+ years, various third-party apps have added conventions that stuck. This actually creates a "wrong" way of doing things. As right as it is to put "Find" on Command+F it is wrong to put it on Command+K which used to be whatever the app likes but now it is almost always "Konnect". If your app says K is for Find I have 50 other apps that say you're wrong. On Windows it would be hard to muster such a jury.
With Adobe apps you are using desktop publishing conventions, not Mac conventions per se, but it's the same heritage. If it helps any, Mac users complain that each new Adobe revision is too Windows-like also.
> You see, every Mac user gets all whiny when an applicaton is merely 'ported' to their platform without taking into consideration
> the 'unique nature of the Mac'.
No, we don't get whiny, we just don't use the app. It's less about looks and more about functionality. There are a lot of things that have been the same way for over 20 years straight in the Mac interface, so if you want to use a different shortcut for Find then everybody else you're going to hear about it. That stuff belongs to the user, not the app developer. This isn't Bill Gates personal software enthusiasts club.
The thing is, I want to go along with your argument, but when I went and looked at what a Windows app is "supposed" to look like I found out that Vista has two entirely different looks, and XP adds at least one more. So what you're arguing is that in order to release Safari on Windows, instead of porting the UI from the Mac with it's "Apple" look now thanks to iTunes, they should have built 3-4 separate UI's in various Microsoft styles and maybe show 4-5 different Safari looks in the documentation just to make sure the user can recognize their freaking Web browser?
> While [Windows-based] security nerds were ripping Apple for a buggy beta, the [Windows-based] UI enthusiasts
What in the hell are these people doing running Windows if they are into security and UI?
The fact that you can ask 5 people how Safari for Windows is advantageous to Apple and get 5 different responses, all positive, probably means it is advantageous to Apple in at least a couple of ways.
> How embarrassing to release a browser that has to have six patches on its first freaking release day.
The reason is all secrecy. WebKit is an open source project, so for example the Mac build of Safari v3 had dailies going back a long way and much QA. The Windows version was in a vault. The day of the announcement Dave Hyatt (lead Safari developer) was calling for Windows QA people to apply at Apple on his blog.
So anyway, I'm saying that whenever Safari for Windows FIRST shipped, it was going to be raw. However it will get better faster and the flaws are in the browser chrome not the core engine.
> Yes you can remove IE completely but MS apps that require IE to render HTML internally won't work if you do it.
That is the whole problem. The Internet Explorer application is artificially tied into the operating system. You cannot remove it without damaging the system.
The reason to say "artificially tied" is that core services are not applications and vice versa. By technical definition. The part of IE which the user may choose not to use (the browsing application, there are many of these, there is a market, the user chooses them at a level above the operating system) is not separate from the part of IE that belongs in the system (the rendering engine and other core services). It is basic software architecture being violated by Microsoft in order to keep the Windows user using IE. That is the only purpose.
On the Mac, you can drag and drop Safari to the Trash and flush and you have not affected the operating system at all. Which is good because mail clients, RSS readers, the Help Viewer, iTunes, third-party browsers, and many other apps all use the system's core services.
> Nobody forces you to IE
Definitely not. Nobody forces you to use Windows either. But if you use Windows, Microsoft has taken many steps to keep IE on your computer for some unstated reason, even if you have three other favorite browsers and don't want a fourth on your computer.
There is no technical way to defend the HTML rendering being in an app. There never was, but it's even worse now. The late 90's vision of the Web was that you would run thousands of apps in your browser and so never need another non-browser app. At least with that in mind you can see what Microsoft's madness initially was. However now we see that the Web is just one application of the Internet. It is the one that specifically attempts to be universal, so it is important, but at the same time, because it is universal, the pace of change is fucking glacial. If Apple waited until iTunes could run in a browser we would have quantum iPods with no music on them. Instead of the Netscape vision of every app is a Web app, we have more like the Sun vision of the network is the computer. In this model, you don't mind to have a separate RSS reader for news feed junkies, you have a Wi-Fi VOIP phone, you have blogging tools, IM. There are even Web sites such as Twitter that then became native apps (Twitterific I think), escaping the Web entirely to run on the bare Internet.
If you use a Mac for 20 minutes you'll notice the Web browser is just one thing out of dozens. Lots of people know this now. The bizarre argument that putting IE in the trash destroys MSHTML.dll for some pre-ordained reason it is foolish to even contemplate it.
> I believe bootcamp has had a significant impact on mac purchases. I bought a Mac because of it.
Apple specifically went after you guys. What better people to sell "Intel" to?
At the beginning of each transition Apple needs to get a bunch of new users to offset current users who dig-in with their old stuff and wait out the transition. The Unix people kept hardware sales up in the first year or two of Mac OS X because it wasn't until then that a Mac user could really use Mac OS X. And anyone with a Tiger G5 when the Intel announcement happened had zero interest in a Tiger Intel Rosetta combo. Much better to sell that Core Duo sandwich to someone who is already shopping for Core Duos.
There is more than one way to get through the transition. The obvious way is to change PowerPC to Intel and keep Mac OS X and your apps the same, but the other way is to go HP to Apple and keep Windows and your apps the same. Either way, you will all almost certainly be running Leopard on your next machines, it will be in full swing by then, very hard to resist for yesterday's Windows, especially if you can have yesterday's Windows in a box anyway. Parallels is like $50, that is less than anti-virus.
> Microsoft has got the same crap for doing bad ports for Apple.
All of Microsoft's Mac products STARTED on the Mac, except for Internet Explorer, which on the Mac was an entirely different product, other than the name it started there also.
Windows users can't complain about Safari not matching Windows, there has not been a version of Windows that had one look of its own since 2000. XP and Vista both have two entirely different GUI looks.
On the Mac, when you take the computer out of the box, it already has one of every kind of software on it. A third-party solution has to be better than what's included on the Mac before the user even considers buying it. For example, there is no Photoshop Album for Mac because we ALL have iPhoto, there is no need.
> The Acid2 test tests a tiny tiny subset of CSS.
The subset that people actually use in their CSS style sheets.
> Yes but phones have already dropped through the price barrier.
No, phones right now are exactly where MP3 players were in 2001 when Apple released the iPod. There are cheap ones, and there are expensive ones, but there aren't any that don't suck. Most have the UI from a pocket calculator from the 1970's.
I had an MP3 player in 1999 that was "consumer-priced" at $149 but it could only hold half a CD and it took a half hour to get that on there. I was happy to pay $399 for an iPod two years later.
It's not just price, you have to make it work if you expect people to choose these things for themselves. It's not I-T where there is a conspiracy of sleazy business people who think they are smart about technology and buy all Microsoft products and dole them out to their workers.
> Microsoft heavily promoted WMA as an alternate audio format, mostly because they owned it. The fact that it was DRM capable,
> and so the RIAA would like it was just icing.
No, you are wrong.
Microsoft cloned MP3 as its own WMA format, just as they have with many formats, many times before. For example, the AIFF raw audio format from the Mac with some new headers: WAV. If you doubt WMA is a clone of MP3, I have only to point out that a) Microsoft is not an audio company, for them to suddenly start competing with Dolby and Fraunhofer overnight seemed pretty magical at the time, and b) Microsoft just paid billions of dollars to Fraunhofer after losing a court case where a JUDGE (not an I-T person) looked at the underlying technology in WMA and MP3 and found it to be such a complete rip-off hat he ordered Microsoft to pay licensing fees to Fraunhofer. All WMA's are licensed by Fraunhofer, creator of MP3. All of them, worldwide.
Microsoft specifically tried to get WMA into every place music is stored, along with its content tax, where the creator of the content has to pay Microsoft a set amount per copy sold, and they actually managed to get into the DVD-Audio spec for a couple of years. The idea was that you would buy an audio DVD with 24-bit hi-res audio for home listening, but on the DVD-ROM would be a JUKEBOX folder with WMA in it, which your PC would copy to your Windows Media capable music player. After the iPod hit, this was changed to MPEG-4 AAC but DVD-Audio is dead anyway.
The coders at Microsoft are all that I-T people think of, but the coders are just there to create stuff that has already been sold. The real heart of Microsoft is their business dealings. What are they famous for? Fucking IBM in the mouth at the height of their power. That is where there muscle is.
So you prefer to think that Microsoft just happened to accidentally invent WMA and then they said "here, world, you need an alternative audio format" but the fact is that WMA exists only and solely to lock-in the music industry to a Microsoft "vig". Vig is an interesting word that extortionists use and which you will find thousands upon thousands of times in any record of Microsoft's internal correspondence. It is what they are all about: a vig with every PC, a vig with every music album, a vig with every banking transaction, just sit back and watch the money roll in while others work and build. That's what they do, it's all they do.
> Safari's CSS support is as bad as IE's
That is ridiculous. Explorer doesn't support any of the CSS specifications fully, not even v1, and cannot pass any of the Acid tests, not even the first one.
Safari passes both Acid tests, even Firefox can't do the second one yet. The Acid tests are made to represent the stuff people actually use in their coding.
I can just as easily remind you that only Safari is rendering text-shadow, that is more useful than text-transform and text-variant by a long shot, not just for drop shadows (an actual style thing) but for inset text, that looks like it's cut into the background.
Firefox is behind Safari in some ways, specifically styles and typography. I'm sure Apple wants iPhone developers to use those features in their apps. For example, Firefox does not support CSS text-shadow, that is used not only to make drop shadows on text but also to make it appear to be inset, cut into the background.
... that is a small minority of the world's Web-capable devices. Phones outnumber PC's today by 4:1 it will get worse for the PC. Safari and Firefox will enable the PC to keep up with Web 2.0.
However the main reason for Safari coming to Windows is that there are only two Web 2.0 browsers in the world and Safari is one of them, Firefox is the other. Expect to see Safari 3 and Firefox 3 on a lot of devices, that is all we got. Users will need one or the other as they go forward with the Web, and having both is much better than either one alone.
Internet Explorer only runs on Windows PC's
> I'm very skeptical that millions of people are going to download a different browser for their desktop in order to be compatible with their phone.
They won't have to download, it comes with. It's on the iPhone disc.
The reason people need it is because after you see how good the Web looks in Safari it's hard to go back to IE. It's like after you get a laser printer it's hard to go back to dot-matrix.
> Why would iPhone Web 2.0 developers be so short-sighted as to demand that their clients install a special browser on their desktops to access their apps.
Why would iPhone Web 2.0 developers do 150% more development work in order to support Explorer for Windows when it is neither a Web 2.0 browser nor a mobile browser? How many WML sites work in IE? What is the point of that?
Many are complaining that they can't make native iPhone apps. I don't see those people working for one month to make a killer iPhone app and then they go "wait, don't release it, lets work for 3 months more and get it running badly in Explorer."
> What makes you think that they will have that kind of market clout.
Microsoft has zero market share in Web 2.0. Additionally, they have zero market share in mobile Web 2.0.
Safari and Firefox are the Coke and Pepsi of Web 2.0 on the Desktop. Safari is in 3 beta, and Firefox will ship 3 soon. Microsoft has not shipped v1 of it's Web 2.0 browser. Even as big as they are, they can't catch up, it takes years to get your browser as mature as Firefox and Safari are right now.
Safari v3 for Windows is the very first beta of that browser on a new platform, yet it is over twice as fast as IE v7. That is only going to get worse, there are no 100000 GHz chips coming to fix that, you cannot port IE v7 from Windows to a phone and expect it to get faster. There is no there there with IE Windows. Parts of it are fused into Windows, parts of it are broken, parts of it are deliberately incompatible with Web 1.0 and parts are deliberately incompatible with Web 2.0. They don't have an asset to get into this game with.
There are 2 billion phones right now and only a quarter of that many PC's. Right now, though, the Web is on PC's and not on phones, in spite of the phones having always-on network connections and the computing power of a 1997 workstation. This situation is being rectified right now but not by Microsoft. Their actions have shut the Web out of phones, confined it to the PC, because Microsoft is irrelevant on the phones. Not only do they not have market share of any kind, they don't have TECHNOLOGY. They don't have the ability to make consumer products, they don't have any consumer customers, they don't have brand loyalty or even a good reputation.
All multimedia on Windows has always required QuickTime.
Today it is an MPEG-4 AAC audio file, 10 years ago it was a CD-ROM.
Microsoft has never built the equivalent layer for Windows. They sometimes build some of it, but within a few years that is gone and they have something else.
There are no standard codecs in Windows, there is no standard architecture for media. To bring iTunes to Windows AT THE BRAYING REQUEST OF WINDOWS USERS Apple had to bring some infrastructure also.
If you have a complaint about it, you really should just uninstall all your Apple software and use Windows Media Player and a Zune. That is available.
> 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.
Imagine two ads for two competing phones:
- jPhone runs calculators, poker games, memory managers, PIM's, an IDE
- iPhone runs MySpace, Flickr, Twitter, eBay, Yahoo, Slashdot
Which do you really think will succeed in the consumer market?
How many people who are reading this right now would trade one of their phone's third-party apps for a desktop level browser that can run Slashdot without any compromises?
The reason the "calculator" app is such a staple of phones is that they are all pocket calculators with phones built-in. With the iPhone it is an iPod with phone built in. The apps you want are of a different nature also.
> force people to download Safari in order to get iTunes (the way he forces them to download Quicktime)
First, nobody is forced to download iTunes. If you have seen such a case you should call the cops.
Second, the reason Windows users have to download QuickTime today is the same exact reason they had to do it 10 years ago: Windows lacks a modern media architecture. There is not even an MPEG-4 decoder in Windows, that has been ISO standard and the standard of the music and video industry since 2002.
Third, MPEG-4 is the international standardization of the QuickTime file format. Instead of basing iTunes and iPod around MPEG-4, Apple could easily have just used QuickTIme. The only difference to the user would be the change of the ".m4a" and ".m4v" file name endings to ".mov" other than that nobody would notice. In fact, Apple would be able to offer even richer multimedia in iTunes, MPEG-4 is still a step behind.
So in short, all of your haughty attitude is bullshit. Not only is Apple not engaged in some malfeasance, they have specifically resisted malfeasances that no other computer industry organization would resist, because they know that doesn't fly in consumer electronics. Even Sony could never get their own music format going and they own a record company.
Any help that Windows users get from the future is only going to help them.
Also it is pretty well known that the first 5 million iPhones were made by one Asian supplier, and the second 5 million were recently ordered at another supplier. The second ones are supposed to be 3G European iPhones.
> Redefining "Open" are we? Yes, Apple is a licensor of the patented AAC algorithms.
No, you are redefining "open" to go along with your narrow view of the I-T industry and the current debate over software patents.
The reality is that it means different things in different industries. Very few people in the world care about patents. That is only 25 years. In music, the CD is almost 30 and copyright lasts 95 years after you're dead.
In music codecs, there are three points at which you can charge money in order to support the development of the codec:
1) the encoder - you charge $x per encoder shipped
2) the player - you charge $x per player shipped
3) the content - you charge $x per copy of content shipped or served
The third rail of this is #3. Software people always try to get a content tax with each new generation, and they never get it, but they never stop trying. For example, the content tax is the foundation of Microsoft's business model, therefore their encoder is free to use and player is free to use. But nobody in music is ever going to use it because it means hiring an accountant to count all of your copies of content and keep sending Microsoft money and one day they will show up with lawyers and want to look at your books anyway, like the BSA thing. Even with the CD many artists never made any money, why would we want to sell a point to Microsoft?
With MPEG-4, there was a content tax initially, until Steve Jobs told MPEG-4 to drop it or forget about being part of QuickTime and they dropped it immediately and the rest is history.
Charging at the player, #2 above, is also not feasible because all that leads to is the cheapest players lacking various codecs. You give the player manufacturer a financial incentive to be non-standard. That is how you could end up with a situation where every Chinese media player won't play MPEG-4, opting instead for free decoders and let the music industry sort it out, the player is already sold. This leads to frustration for the listener, who is the point of this whole thing. If we involve them in the production we have lost, we have abrogated our responsibility to them to create a functional music playback system.
That leaves charging for the encoder. That is how we do it in music and video. We like it that way. It costs me $29 every other year for my 200 encoders it is a very minimal expense. At a penny a track content tax (which is low for Microsoft) all I have to do is sell 2900 copies of a single track to break even on all of my encoders. I probably pay more per year for the computer screen cleaning kit that I use. That is why software people want the content tax. They see irresistible dollar signs as their library of taxable content grows. As usual, Microsoft wants to fix something that's not broken. As usual, with Ogg, Linux wants to help break it.
The reason I get pissed off when I hear somebody push Ogg or some other "totally free" encoder/decoder solution is that if the entire music industry moved to Ogg (if we could put up with the reduction in sound quality for the whole human race) then we would have a couple of years of sub-standard but totally free encoding and decoding before "Ogg 2 now with content tax" because we have to support the heroic coders who selflessly make Ogg better for the benefit of humanity and it's not too much to ask to get a penny a track when you are writing code that will make every song sound better. No.
One reason the music industry didn't "get" MP3 was because we already knew what it was, the shitty sounding soundtrack from a DVD. MP3 has specific problems that make it unsuitable for music playback. With AAC, it was designed by Dolby to be good to music also, and to even fit under 64 kbit/s for the Internet with dropping below CD sample rate, it is custom made for me and everyone else like me because it's what we asked Dolby for like 10 years ago. At this point if you are talking audio codecs you should read the history at least. You're not going to change MPEG at this point, it's working too well.
> I can't speak for the US, but here in the UK, if you don't have 3G then you're never going anywhere with giving the user a decent browsing
> experience. Speaking only about browsing, Apple will be behind the game even before they've launched.
That is a geek perspective, I'm sorry but it is not going to translate to consumers. Geeks know about bandwidth, consumers just wait for the page to load, that is the fact. And on the other hand, geeks will put up with no CSS or a 1994 view of the Web, while consumers think that is broken. That is not the Internet to them, that is not the Web.
If you A-B an iPhone on a 56k dial-up connection next to your rig on a T1 the consumer will take the iPhone every time because it runs the real Flickr slowly instead of a faux-Flickr at regular speeds. It runs the real MySpace and the real eBay and on and on and on.
Also, it's important to note that the iPhone cell connection is its SECONDARY DATA CONNECTION. It's primary data connection is Wi-Fi "n". It's 1/8th the real world speed of Gigabit Ethernet. Most consumers have NEVER surfed the Web that fast. The typical home or office connection is much slower.
Finally, with Ajax programming, the only "page load" is the initial HTML page, while you build a DOM tree. If your browser has Ajax (like iPhone, unlike that relic you're carrying around) then the page load is SNAP! and then you start loading in content in the background, and you use subtle animations to hide download times, you load slideshows a few photos ahead so that when it is time to show the user a photo, it is just SNAP! the photo has been on the device for like 20 seconds already, you build up a time lag, you play psychological games on the user to convince them the content is already on their device.