Take a Safari at Windows

The recent announcement of Steve Jobs about the new Safari browser for Windows was the most juicy issue of the WWDC07. It was even more important than the preview of Leopard, if we consider that it is about a browser ready (?) to be used in a different OS. Actually, Safari is in beta stage and the truth is that it is completely raw. It provides nothing but a simulation of MacOS environment so far.

I am sure that Safari will work smoothly in Windows pretty soon. (Right now it just doesn’t work.) Jobs said that Safari aims to increase its usage percent among the other browsers. That must be the truth. Maybe not the whole truth but a part of it only.

Playing away from home

Safari is an incredibly fast browser in MacOS. It doesn’t do more than Firefox or new Camino, but you can’t imagine how fast it is. It is a tool which can’t be ignored.

Safari has to confront mostly Firefox and Opera, not Internet Explorer. Why? Because it is certain that many users can’t leave IE behind. If people were eager to ignore IE, it wouldn’t have been used by a 78%. Despite the fact that Firefox is faster, more secure and supports more features it is still far behind IE. Why should people move to Safari if they can’t move to Firefox?

As a result Safari targets to the 22% which is left and it affords people who don’t care to play a little with their browsers. Of course this 22% is going to grow by time. Nevertheless I am not sure how large is going to be.

A way to overcome Firefox and a Trojan Horse

So the question is how Firefox could be overwhelmed by Safari. It might, if Safari was a much faster browser. The first impressions of Safari show that it is slower than Firefox and Opera. This is a problem. Shouldn’t Apple care about this? Absolutely. Shouldn’t Apple create a stable browser? Of course. Yes, but right now a user can’t find a reason to switch.

When a browser is not fast and stable then it can’t be good enough. As simply as that. There is only one possible feature of Safari which can turn the tide. The name of it is iPhone. This multi-gadget can be the Trojan Horse of Apple.

If iPhone will change the industry the way iPod did, everything can be different in the future and Safari can become an indispensible tool for every user. I don’t know how, but Jobs and his fellows should. Remember that iPod changed the way we treat music. Wouldn’t be possible for iPhone to do the same in the way we treat computers and mobile phones?

Right now people in Cupertino have some time to launch iPhone the best possible way and cover all the caveats of Safari. What we can see now is only a tiny part of the story. This war is too harsh to end so soon and future is too near to be so obscure. The game has just began.