Apple's Safari On Windows
Brian walked in the office a moment ago, all disappointed. The keynote that Steve Jobs gave at the WWDC did not contain enough new stuff to satisfy him.
However, Brian did mention the availability of Safari for Windows, which I downloaded immediately. I am writing this blog entry in it:
Aside from my "This is just like iTunes" reaction when I first saw the download page and the running browser, here are several things that popped up i my mind:
- Can you call an application a Web application if it doesn't run in all three browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari)? In the past, when something doesn't run in Safari, we brush the issue aside with a "That was just a Mac browser, and it works on Firefox on the Mac." We can't do that anymore.
- If working in two out of three browsers (IE and Firefox) qualifies an application as a "Web application", who's to say that Safari and Firefox only applications are not "Web applications"?
- You can write cross-platform Safari applications (at least on Windows, Mac, and the iPhone) now just like you can write cross-platform Firefox applications (for Windows, Linux and the Mac).
- What other applications would Apple release for the Windows platform? Will there be a day when I can enjoy some of the other Mac applications that the Mac fanatics around here praise, almost everyday, on the Windows platform?
- Where is the catch?
Re: Apple's Safari On Windows
Porting Safari to Windows seems to be an effort to get the browser more marketshare, indirectly making the Mac a better platform. I'd like to see the same strategy used for iChat. Having a nice chat client on the Mac is pretty pointless when the only people you can talk to are AIM users (who don't have those features) and other Mac users.