Thoughts on Safari For Windows

Steve Jobs did his annual keynote for Apple’s developer conference earlier this week. People weren’t particularly impressed as seen by the in Apple stock price right after the keynote that is continuing. The “big” announcement was Safari for Windows. This struck me as pretty odd and only made a little more sense once he went on to explain that the only way developers could put applications on the iPhone was to create web applications.

My biggest problem with Safari is that it doesn’t support WYSIWIG editing in WordPress. Maybe it is the other way around–Wordpress doesn’t support Safari, but from what I understand the problem has more to do with Safari than WordPress. I’ve heard rumors that this will be fixed in the next version of Safari and that it partially works in the current beta.

Some people said the idea that Safari is fast is really meaningless when you consider the bottleneck is the network. This isn’t exactly true. Firefox does great when you are dealing with one to five tabs. But if you want to launch 20 or 50 tabs at a time, it starts having problems. It also gets bogged down when there is a lot of javascript on the page. Worse yet, when I’m really busy Firefox likes to hang for a few minutes at a time. I think this is related to having a bunch of windows open, but I don’t notice that happening with Safari.

I use Firefox for most of my browsing because I like the way it handles search better than Safari and it has some toolbars I use, but if I ever run into a site that seems slow to render, I jump over to Safari. I also use Safari if I’m trying to work with a bunch of websites at the same time. So if I want to compare a bunch of cars for sale and open all the ones I’m interested in separate tabs, I’ll probably use Safari because Firefox starts getting really slow. Over the past few months, I’ve found myself doing more and more of my work in Safari.

So if you are currently using Internet Explorer or Firefox, I’d suggest giving Safari a try when it comes out. There is a beta available for download already. Depending on your browsing habits, you may find it really speeds things up.

I was a little disappointed that the iPhone isn’t going to allow developers to write apps for it.  The reasoning?  To keep it secure.  Steve said they didn’t want a rogue app taking down Cingular’s network.  This doesn’t really make sense.  Most phones allow you to run java based programs, so the idea that it some how is protecting Cingular’s network really doesn’t make any sense from a security standpoint.

However, it might make sense from another.  If Apple has negotiated a special rate for data services, it might be based on the types of traffic the iPhone can generate.  By not allowing third party applications it will reduce the amount of traffic each phone can possibly generate.  So if the data plan turns out to only cost an additional $20, this might make sense.  If the data plan comes in at $60 per month it doesn’t.

I’m interested in playing around with an iPhone because I think it is going to be pretty much impossible for the keyboard to beat what I have on my Blackberry right now, but just like I don’t think it would have been a good investment to buy a first generation iPod the iPhone looks like something that might have some promise in the second or third revision.  Fortunately for Apple, I’m sure there are enough people who will buy it to make things worth the R&D for the next generation.