Safari for Windows

June 11, 2007

It crashed the first time I ran it. It has its own UI; no Aero title bar, menus, buttons or scroll bars. I can’t close it by double clicking in the upper left corner of my screen. It’s too thick with its font antialiasing. But it runs on Windows, which means I don’t need a Browsercam account to do quick design tests. Safari for Windows Beta released today.

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4 Responses

  1. Zach Holman

    June 11th, 2007

    I think it’s an interesting idea, and even if it fails to catch on and only picks up another couple percentage points of market share in the Windows world, it’ll at least make cross-browser development a whole lot easier, as you mentioned. From a strategic standpoint, yeah, I see the benefit of getting more hooks into the Windows world (and thus maybe getting more people to move to OS X in the long-term), but it is a different move than iTunes. With iTunes, Apple could sell you iPods and songs from the music store. Safari, other than the vague hope to get people on OS X, doesn’t have direct revenue potential. Makes one wonder if this is going to be an indicator of the next couple of years… iChat on Windows? With all the cool stuff they’re pushing into iChat (sharing screens, files, presentations, video, etc.), it’d definitely be useful to get more of the market supporting that.

    (Oooh! I just noticed while typing this that Safari 3 supports resizable form fields, which is a change from Safari 2. Cool beans.)

  2. Dan

    June 11th, 2007

    I think one reason is to attract the 95% of developers that don’t use OS X to develop for the iPhone, since they now have access to the same browser the phone has to test with.

  3. Zach Holman

    June 11th, 2007

    Good point. I’ve also run into John Gruber’s remarks on it:

    My somewhat-informed understanding is that Apple is currently generating about $2 million per month from Safari’s Google integration. That’s $25 million per year. If Safari for Windows is even moderately successful, it’s easy to see how that might grow to $100 million per year or more.

    I always forget about that revenue generator. It goes to show that my point above that Safari “doesn’t have direct revenue potential” isn’t exactly accurate.

  4. Josh Catone

    June 11th, 2007

    The had a similar idea over on Webware: http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9728298-2.html

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