Mosquito Bites on Safari
In a so-so keynote for Apple developers yesterday, The Steve revealed something that the Mozilla group and others had predicted perfectly: Safari for Windows. I had dismissed the idea, but being dead wrong won’t stop me from holding forth on what it all means.
My own take is that this move brings a development platform for the iPhone to Windows users and developers. And, of course, it will tie nicely into iTunes, the media sales outlet for anyone with an iPod, which happens to be a lot of Windows users.
There’s some good commentary out there, but what do I see within the first day of Safari for Windows’ public beta?
- Complaints about font rendering (fair enough) – What’s Wrong With Apple’s Font Rendering? Alex thinks the answer is ‘nothing’ and I trust his eye.
- Breathless crash reports – Apple Safari for Windows – Out with a crash
- And my fave, Safari for Windows 0day Exploit in 2 Hours which links to a blank page. Nice, though possibly removed to weather high traffic. [Update: it looks like there actually are some security issues with the beta. Bad form for an open beta.]
It’s almost like the word beta means something again.
Darren has some thoughts on the increased hassle that yet another browser makes for web developers. I mostly disagree, since OS virtualization has made cross-platform testing much easier in the last 18 months (at least from Mac to Windows), and I don’t think this is about browser wars as much as it is the iPhone. But I may be wrong, as I was about the whole thing to start with. But on the subject of web development costs…
Through Ma.gnolia I’ve been able to work on a project that has done a good job of working with web standards from the start. Every time we do anything beyond the most basic, the browser that must be coddled the most is Internet Explorer. The amount of drag that this beast has put on our development efforts compared to Firefox, Safari, Opera and Camino is atrocious, and it speaks to the IE tax added to any web project with the gall to be innovative and not be exclusive to Microsoft’s browser. Safari has its share of grr-worthy tricks, to be sure. But they’re the exceptions, and they’re called bugs, rather than ‘strategies’ and ‘innovations’. But over the past decade of professional web development, thousands of work-years have been poured into supporting IE’s ‘my way’ approach to the web. The cost to the entire industry in incalculable, if it hasn’t been downright criminal.
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