June 2007, Safari’s turning point
June 2007 marks the appearance of Safari aka WebKit in three major new places: Adobe AIR beta 1 on June 11, Safari 3 for Windows on June 12, and the iPhone on June 29. Right now the blogosphere is making a lot of noise about all the problems with Safari for Windows — it looks too Mac-like, it’s got security flaws, it’s not as fast as claimed — but those problems aren’t nearly as important as what this month means for Safari and WebKit’s future.
A big part of the reason so many people are piling on the complaints about Safari for Windows is that it’s not at all obvious why Apple is devoting precious developer resources to porting Safari to Windows. Did we really need another Windows browser to test against? And couldn’t those engineers have been helping to get Leopard out on time? If it were clearer why Apple is doing this, I’m not sure the reaction would have been so negative.
I don’t know why Apple is bringing Safari to Windows. But it’s a very exciting puzzle, and I have some guesses.
Guess #1: Steve Jobs got really tired of seeing every single blasted Web 2.0 app say “Sorry, but your browser isn’t supported yet, please use Firefox instead, Safari support is coming soon, etc.” Delayed or omitted support for Safari has become a cliché of AJAX applications, and even Buzzword, which relies on Flash and not the browser for 99% of its functionality, didn’t work perfectly on Safari until the latest preview release we pushed out yesterday. By bringing Safari 3 out and porting it to Windows, Apple accomplishes three things which will help in getting Safari supported by AJAX apps faster: it will increase Safari browser share, it will make testing against Safari possible for developers who haven’t yet switched to Mac, and it will be easier to support because of improvements to WebKit in the latest version.
Guess #2: It’s the iPhone. Part of the key to iPod’s world domination was the giant ecosystem enabled by the existence of iTunes on both Mac and Windows. If Safari is the platform for third-party iPhone apps, and the iPhone is to dominate the mobile phone world, then its application platform has to be equally ubiquitous. Gotta be able to run your iPhone apps on Windows too.
Guess #3: Psych warfare against Redmond. OK, that’s pretty far-fetched, but people say the same thing about Google Apps.
By the way, I don’t think the Adobe AIR connection represents a secret Adobe-Apple plot. Adobe needed a modern, well-written browser engine, and WebKit was the smallest and fastest of the bunch, with the best code, in their opinion. So WebKit is in AIR and the iPhone for similar reasons of size and performance. But what’s really cool is the possibility of writing apps that work exactly the same on the iPhone and in Adobe AIR on Mac and Windows. Gotta think more about that one.
My prediction: we’ll look back to June 2007 as the month when Safari’s browser share in our server logs started a long, slow, but inexorable rise, and users on three platforms benefited from it.
Technorati Tags: AIR, Buzzword, Safari
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I think it’s funny that many people are complaining about “another Windows browser!” It seems to me that Safari on Windows will be a big benefit because it will allow web developers without access to a Mac machine to test on Safari. There are just too many sites out there where Safari was ignored because no one wanted to buy a Mac.
Josh, I completely agree. The transition is going to be slow, though, since it won’t really be safe to use Safari 3 for Windows as a subsitute testing platform until OS X Leopard and Safari 3 for Mac are ubiquitious, and that’ll be some time next year at the earliest.
By the way, John Gruber suggested another great reason why Apple ported Safari to Windows, and I hit my head in shame that I didn’t think of it myself: browsers make money.