Safari Trips Over Steve's Quips
Steve Jobs is a marketeer par excellence. And as long as the Mac was a closed system, he could get away with all sorts of hype. Problem is, iTunes and now Safari also run on Windows, which allows real head-to-head comparisons with other software. Apple software does not always compare well under the harsh light of the other 95% of the PC market.
Consider the just-released Safari for Windows beta. Frankly, it does not show well compared to either Internet Explorer or Firefox.
Item: Jobs announcement this week of Safari for Windows hyped speed as one of its advantages. Wired News reports benchmark tests showing that Safari on Windows is slower on average than IE and Firefox.
Item: Jobs touts Safari as "secure from day one." As of this writing, researchers have already found ten security flaws in Safari for Windows, several of which are catastrophic, allowing exploits that gives the attacker complete control of your computer.
Item: Jobs brags that Safari is the gold-standard for browsing. Safari displays many simple web pages incorrectly (including my own). This is not new. It is due to flaws in its rendering engine, long known and documented. Web designers know workarounds for these bugs, though they are cumbersome and most web sites do not bother to chase these issues that less than 5% of visitors (Mac users) experience. These errors will become more glaring as Safari is used on Windows. Simply put, IE and Firefox observe the W3C standards and Safari does not.
Of course, Safari for Windows is not about being the web browser of choice for Windows users. This is instead about iPhone. Jobs this week announced that third parties could develop iPhone applications that run in the iPhone's version of the Safari browser. The Safari for Windows strategy is to provide all those Windows-based software developers a development platform for iPhone applications. Safari becomes the analog of Visual Studio for iPhone.
None-the-less, as Safari is exposed to "the rest of us," it may need to actually live up to its hype.
Copyright © 2007 Philip Bookman
Technorati: Business Strategy, Strategic Planning, Safari, Apple
Consider the just-released Safari for Windows beta. Frankly, it does not show well compared to either Internet Explorer or Firefox.
Item: Jobs announcement this week of Safari for Windows hyped speed as one of its advantages. Wired News reports benchmark tests showing that Safari on Windows is slower on average than IE and Firefox.
Item: Jobs touts Safari as "secure from day one." As of this writing, researchers have already found ten security flaws in Safari for Windows, several of which are catastrophic, allowing exploits that gives the attacker complete control of your computer.
Item: Jobs brags that Safari is the gold-standard for browsing. Safari displays many simple web pages incorrectly (including my own). This is not new. It is due to flaws in its rendering engine, long known and documented. Web designers know workarounds for these bugs, though they are cumbersome and most web sites do not bother to chase these issues that less than 5% of visitors (Mac users) experience. These errors will become more glaring as Safari is used on Windows. Simply put, IE and Firefox observe the W3C standards and Safari does not.
Of course, Safari for Windows is not about being the web browser of choice for Windows users. This is instead about iPhone. Jobs this week announced that third parties could develop iPhone applications that run in the iPhone's version of the Safari browser. The Safari for Windows strategy is to provide all those Windows-based software developers a development platform for iPhone applications. Safari becomes the analog of Visual Studio for iPhone.
None-the-less, as Safari is exposed to "the rest of us," it may need to actually live up to its hype.
Copyright © 2007 Philip Bookman
Technorati: Business Strategy, Strategic Planning, Safari, Apple
Labels: Apple, Business Strategy, Safari, Strategic Planning
posted by Phil Bookman at 11:05 AM
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