On Safari
When Steve Jobs dropped his “one more thing…” dirty bomb on Monday, my immediate reaction was to quit my job and go to culinary school. I downloaded the beta and gave it a brief whirl on the Mac and the XP box (I’ve since uninstalled the Mac version to go back to 2.0 since that’s what we support, but I’ve left 3.0 on XP).
I really don’t see Safari being a huge hit for the Windows users, and my reasoning is as follows: Most Mac users don’t even use Safari. Most Mac users that I know use Firefox because they know better. Safari is effectively the IE of the Mac world. It ships with and is the default browser of the OS in question. Non-technical people who use Macs typically use Safari because it’s there and it works. In the same way that many Windows users use IE because it’s there. I won’t get into whether it actually works.
Sure, developers and technophiles are going to download it and play with it, and we may add it to our test suites, but it’s not becoming a default for us. That leaves the non-technical Windows users, and if they’re in the market for a different browser, chances are they’re already using Firefox.
I’m interested to see how Apple tries to market Safari for Windows, who they target it to, and ultimately how well it does. It’s not off to the best of starts, although releasing an update within a couple of days says good things about the development team and their commitment to security and fixing bugs.