More thoughts on Safari and OSX
I literally just posted a post on Thurrott deciding he’s the man. Scott makes the point (in the comments section) that he follows up his posting immediately with a post saying how awful Safari is on Mac’s, let alone windows. And the whole thing got me thinking some more.
First of, Thurrott states his idea that Safari is the future like he had some deep insight into Apple. I posted a bit saying that everyone noticed that - Apple even made a point of it by bringing up Safari as the “one more thing” always a clue that it’s important. But my myopic vision failed me in the grander sense - everyone’s been talking about the web browser as the new OS for years now. There’s not one shred of novel information in the contention that the web is an interesting platform for computing.
Paul Thurrott gets it completely backwards when he says that Safari is the future not Leopard (and by extension OSX). It isn’t Safari at all that is important, Safari is just a browser, mediocre at best right now. The interesting thing is that it has been ported to the iPhone at all - the reason this was able to happen? OSX.
Apple’s brilliance was in adapting their operating system and taking the bits of it that would make porting apps to it easier while at the same time updating the user interface to be appropriate (this is where Microsoft got it wrong) to the device. I think that in one sense I agree with Thurrott in that Leopard is not the future, but that’s a silly thing to say in general. It’d be like saying CS3 is the future for Adobe, it’s just a version of their software, a moment in time. But a generalized OSX is the future.
That Apple pulled engineers from their Mac OSX group to hit last minute iPhone changes is a testament to the underlying structure that powers both the desktop and the mobile OS. Safari and the web apps are a nice and convenient byproduct of this strategy. Safari is clearly important to Apple, but the future lies in extending OSX’s tendrils into more and more devices letting them leverage their existing software and (hopefully) developer base into any new areas they get into.
June 16th, 2007 at 7:38 pm
Hey, don’t hate on safari… I actually think it is a brilliant browser. If the goodness that is the del.icio.us plugin existed for it I’d switch back.
it is cocoa, it has real object handling, it has better font/type rendering, it doesn’t eat memory like firefox, it has actual applescript integration and it is standards based. the latest webkit builds have edit mode and pass all the standards tests to boot. also, it uses real osx widgets and chrome.
I think that it is wrong to assume that people only use it out of ignorence….
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June 16th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
Oh, it’s my blog and I’ll hate whatever I want to! I dunno, I used WebKit for awhile a few months back and couldn’t take it, I don’t remember specifically what I disliked about it, though. I do really, really, really hate the reload/stop button - I’m constantly bookmarking pages I mean to stop loading.
It also doesn’t have WebDeveloper and Tamper Data and the javascript console amongst other things that are not the fault of the browser specifically, but still make it impossible for me to switch. If they’re looking to make it a first class app development platform with their small market share, they’re going to need extensions like that in a hurry.
June 17th, 2007 at 6:45 am
I see what you mean. As a dev platform Safari is not very good. Problem is that to me at least as a consumer platform Firefox is pretty awful. It looks like crap, it has nonstandard window behavior, the download manager is odd and it has poor integration with the OS and it is, ugh, Carbon. Firefox looks really nice on Windows, though, which puzzles me.
Anyway. As a consumer of web product I prefer Safari, save the del.icio.us plugin on Firefox, which tips the balance, but leaves me dissatisfied. Safari works like an OSX app, which is important to me.
June 17th, 2007 at 7:19 am
I did you, I think I don’t notice a lot of the OSX’ness because I’m simply used to firefox. So in ways that it differs from Firefox I get annoyed - which probably isn’t fair, but hey, that’s life. :)
June 20th, 2007 at 10:20 am
[...] any significant period of time in the last year or so, but with Safari 3 all out and buzzing and Robb saying it was a better user experience I figured I’d give it another shot. DL’d the new version and ran it as [...]