I am having a sale on ReviewMe. All reviews only $100 this month (over 50% off!).
About 7.6% of my site’s traffic comes from OS X users and of those around 60% use Safari, but 87.5% use Windows and from 75% of those use Internet Explorer. It’s interesting that even though IE is packaged with Windows and Safari with OS X, a higher percentage of Windows users choose to use IE (of course, they may not realise about the alternative options). In my opinion, this doesn’t comment well on Safari.
I can’t lie, I haven’t tried Safari (under Windows) yet mainly as I haven’t booted into Windows in a couple of days.
The Windows browser market is crowded enough as it is! The last thing we need is another proprietary web browser! We already have enough of those!
I really do question Apple’s motives behind this move, though; whilst iTunes being available on Windows is for obvious reasons, I wonder how porting Safari makes Apple a profit. My guess is that it simply does not. However, by porting it they are trying to move PC users closer towards Apple.
The whole idea of Safari for Windows is almost as funny as Internet Explorer 5 for Mac OS.
I am a satisfied Firefox user on a PC. I’m also very interested in photography and use Flickr daily. What piques my interest about Safari (which I haven’t tried yet), is that it is the only browser I know of that uses embedded color profiles and can therefore correctly display color in images regardless of the color space used by the image. Unfortunately when there is no embedded color profile apparently it does not do too well. And although while I know most web images are sRGB and so are handled fairly well by browsers, Safari’s possible advantage in this area makes it at least something to be considered.
I don’t think it’s as questionable of an idea as you suggest.
One of the obvious reasons why they released Safari on Windows is because of the iPhone. Safari is now the platform to develop for 3rd party developers. So long as you can build standard apps that works in Safari, it’ll work in the iPhone. With Safari on Windows, this will easily increase the number of 3rd party developers. After all, they’re trying to market everyone with the iPhone, not just Mac users.
I use safari all the time. It just works without acres of surplus buttonage and plug-ins. I found the re-vamp of IE to be most peculiar like a manifestation of committee design. And the new user interface in Office 2007 and its copy in MindManager and so forth creat some interesting ‘wheres the xxx gone?’ moments.
Apple is making a point that once iTunes in understood, adding a browser and then maybe mail/news browser would give many users most of what they need to drive a mac – or an iphone.
Personally, I suspect the first version of the iPhone will need some tweaks. I’m guessing disk capacity, battery life and response time, which would be typical of similar attempts from others. And don’t get me staryed on ActiveSync with Windows Mobile…
rashbre