The Safari Browser Offensive

Safari PC

The New Browser War got a little interesting. It’s no longer defined between Firefox or Internet Explorer.

During Steve Jobs’ speech at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco this month, he announced that the new version of Safari, Apple’s Web browser, will run on Microsoft’s Windows opersating system. In fact, public betas are available now.

This reminded me of the time when Microsoft stopped its support of Internet Explorer for Macintosh. At the time, I could understand Microsoft’s pull out.

Microsoft spent a lot of time and money in making a totally different, better browser from Internet Explorer for Windows for their competition. If a Windows user ever sat down and surfed with mac IE, I’m sure they wondered why Win IE wasn’t as slick and possibly think about buying a Macintosh. (Perhaps.)

Now Apple has decided to take its browser to Microsoft’s turf. In the time it took Microsoft to go from Internet Explorer 6 to 7, Apple is pushing their browsr onto another platform. However, I’m not completely sold on the idea for the long-term.

While having Safari on a PC is a great idea as a low-cost way to lower the barrier to getting people to switch from PCs to Macintosh, I’m not too sure about it’s long time presence. Nonethless, I welcome the competition for my desktop and my clients’. 

Having a PC version of Safari around should make convincing clients to stick to Web standards easier.

One thought on “The Safari Browser Offensive

  1. Interesting topic. I haven’t downloaded the Beta yet for IE, but I’m curious to see what the outcome of this decision is, more on the Microsoft side than Apple. I see the business value in pushing the Safari browser to other channels; if anything, it’s free advertising for Apple’s experience. But what is the value for Microsoft exactly? Cross-browser compliance? I don’t know…it seems like this is a minor gain for Apple (I’m personally not a big Safari fan, Firefox is much more nimble), and a minor loss for Microsoft and Explorer.

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