Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Safari 3.0 with XP and Vista support

Safari 3.0 brings Safari to the Windows platform, running on both XP and Vista. In the keynote, Jobs highlighted Safari's quick performance, notably excluding results when compared to Opera... generally noted for it's lightning fast browsing. The Safari homepage, however, does include those stats. While the HTML performance shows Opera lagging (surprisingly) far behind, the Javascript and application launch benchmarks show Opera nearly on par with Safari... which makes me wonder why anyone would switch to Safari when a completely viable and feature-wise similar browser is already available - short of the fact that Apple will most definitely do a better job of marketing it. As is, Opera's market share is pretty small, but it's the browser a lot of Firefox users would switch to if Firefox somehow vanished off the face of the earth. But what would make us want to switch to Safari?Jobs also seemed to imply (if not flat out state) that Safari will eventually be bundled up with the iTunes/Quicktime download for Windows users in an attempt to infiltrate the Windows desktop. You can currently download the public beta unpackaged, but in the future you might have to download the whole 30mb installer including iTunes and Quicktime (the same way that you can't individually download either Quicktime or iTunes). I frankly hate this about iTunes/Quicktime, and if the same holds for Safari, it'll be a major turnoff.

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