Wired’s benchmarks show Safari is slower than IE7 and Firefox. And within a day of its release, 6 security holes were found in it. ArsTechnica was similarly uncomplimentary.
Does it matter? Perhaps not. Jobs is obviously doing two things here: The first is continuing to get Apple’s applications onto Windows desktops, following the path of iTunes and Quicktime. Mind you, Safari is several zillion times less compelling at present; maybe that will improve… and if not, hey chuck them all together into one big bloated mega-package. “Click here to install iTunes 8 + QuickTime + Safari (a billion Mb download; a zillion Mb hard disk space required)”.
(Seriously, iTunes used to be a 20Mb download. Chucking in QuickTime blew it out to 33Mb.)
The other is making it easier for developers (some of whom don’t particularly want to buy Macs) make their web apps work on both Macs and the iPhone. That’s ultimately good for sales of Apple hardware, since more apps will work better with it, further moving away from the crazy “You must have IE on Windows to run this web page properly” thing that some people seem to think is sensible. (Those people really get my goat up. Yeah, sure, take a universal platform like the web and mangle it.)
From the reaction of some people though (Tony: “Wow, Safari really is a beta. Crashing all over the place.”) it’s got a way to go before it can even be used for that. If and when I try it, I’ll be quarantining it in a virtual machine for sure.
Scott “Lazycoder” sarcastically notes his blog is now iPhone-enabled, as it displays properly in Safari. heh.
“… Yeah, sure, take a universal platform like the web and mangle it.”
I once read a comment from a person on the AlphaNT mailing list who said (of Microsoft) that
their approach to standards was “E E E … Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.” Will Apple go the
same way?
I was really talking about people who manage to write web apps that insist on particular browsers to make their stuff work. Though yes, the browser manufacturers help push that along of course!