Safari for Windows thoughts…
Apple has been taking a beating from the bloggers about Safari for Windows over the last couple of days. The criticism ranges from a bunch of security vulnerabilities that have been found to something as basic as font-smoothing. The press, ever eager to capitalize on this, have already predicted that Safari for Windows will fail.
Obviously, I have a different opinion. First of all, to define failure, you first have to set a goal that wasn’t met. Apple’s goal, if you go by the keynote speech, is to supplant Mozilla as the number two browser on all platforms. With Mozilla at approximately 15% and Apple at approximately 5% browser share, Apple would only have to add 6% at Mozilla’s expense for this to happen. With 100 million downloads in the first 48 hours of a beta, this seems like it could very well happen.
In the Computerworld article where Mike Elgan points out Apple’s defeat (bruised and bloodied, over a free product? Come on Mike), several reasons are given for the predetermined failure. The primary reason seems to be that the Safari UI is just too Mac like for most Windows users. I think this is a fair criticism, but hardly one that will sink Safari on Windows. It will definitely hinder the adoption with those who care about such things, but lets be real. These are Windows users. If they really cared about consistent UI, they would be using a Mac anyway.
There are two factors the Mr. Elgan and his ilk have not considered. Both of them will be utilized to make Safari/Webkit on Windows a success.
First off, is the distribution model. Currently, you have to seek out Safari and download it separately. This is an understandable distribution model – for a beta. Once Safari for Windows is declared release ready, I believe Apple will opt for a different distribution strategy. You see, there is this program that Apple gives away called iTunes. Maybe you’ve heard of it. Currently, iTunes users also get Quicktime installed, without even being asked. Of course, this is because iTunes uses Quicktime for most of the underlying technology. But what if Apple included Safari in the iTunes download bundle? During the keynote, Steve mentioned that Apple “knew how to reach Windows users” and continued on to cite the 100 million downloads a day of iTunes for Windows. One can reasonably guess that Apple will either include Safari in that bundle by default, or at least make it an option. If Apple does include Safari by default in the iTunes for Windows download, it will not take very long before it gains the necessary 6 percentage points to trump Firefox as the number two browser.
Another completely overlooked development in the Safari for Windows story is WebKit. WebKit is the underlying engine that powers Safari. It is based on the KHTML rendering engine that powers Konqueror on Linux. WebKit is now available as a free, open source engine on Windows too. This means that if any enterprising developers would like to make a Windows only browser that users a super fast, lean, mean, standards compliant rendering engine, they can now do so with WebKit for Windows. And while these WebKit for Windows browser projects won’t officially contribute to the Safari bottom line market share, they do grow the overall Safari ecosystem. Any site that runs well on WebKit, will run well on any browser/platform combination that uses the WebKit engine.
How realistic is it to think that some Windows developer will use WebKit to build a new Windows browser? Pretty realistic. There is a project called the Swift browser that does just that. The Swift browser project existed before the port of WebKit to Windows. This meant that they had to do a good bit more work themselves to get the rendering engine working on Windows. Now with WebKit an official package, much of that work has been done for them. That means they can concentrate on building the browser and its features, and leave the rendering issues to WebKit. On the Mac platform, where WebKit has existed since 2003, there are no less than three major browser products that use WebKit – OmniWeb, Shiira, and Sunrise browser. There are also dozens of other applications that include WebKit to render HTML – CSSEdit, Coda, TextMate, skEdit and lots more. One can expect that a much larger development base on Windows will see even more adoption.
Of course, with their browser built in to the OS, Microsoft has little to fear from the Safari/WebKit emergence on Windows. But Mozilla stands to lose a good bit in this new browser ecosystem.
