Safari Everywhere
June 11th, 2007Now that’s it been some time since the WWDC keynote (and my initial post), I’ve had some time to think. Specifically one piece of information passed me by, the first time, which sheds light an interesting strategic move Apple has made.
Developers had been looking to see how they would be able to do 3rd-party apps on the iPhone. Apple “disappointed” them by announcing that, sure, you can: just do it as a Web2.0 app and be happy…
Cue grumbling of those devs who bought WWDC passes hoping for XCode for iPhone, shuffling back to over-priced SF hotel rooms to sullenly stare at the free movie package for a few hours.
However, mix this with the Safari for Windows introduction, and I can see what sort of “crazy like a fox” strategy is evolving here…
- Safari 3 is going to be a common web-browser available to iPhone, MacOS X 10.4/10.5, and Windows XP/Vista.
- Build a Web2.0 app and target it towards Safari. In any environment.
- Have it run the same, and flawlessly, such as it is, in all three.
This is a really, really interesting end-run on Windows (and Mozilla et al., at least in one regard). And, one that anyone seriously vested in the AJAX/Web2.0 market should observe with interest. Apple has essentially made it possible to build a Web2.0 application… with all the vagaries of supporting in multiple browsers being swallowed up in a whole “Install Safari” package… with the hook of iPhone support thrown in to boot.
Want an iPhone app? Sexy phone make a baby salivate? Well open up, and make it compatible with Safari by default… and hey, we’ll give you the ability to send that same app back to Windows and MacOS users everywhere!
I’m not sure where this will lead. That it does open up some new and interesting possibilities is certain however. Maybe someone should be looking to see how far they can go with this; and I’m sure someone out there already is.
June 15th, 2007 at 12:51 am
Hmm. Doubtful that most Windows users will switch to (or even know about) Safari. Corporations definitely won’t (do you know how hard it is to switch browsers in a company? the last big switch was Netscape to IE and I doubt anyone’s going to do another).
But sure, public web developers will use Safari on Windows to test their pages for those Apple users who don’t use Firefox.
June 15th, 2007 at 7:46 am
@Kev: I agree with you entirely on that first point. Large organizations change their supported software slowly and are always a revision or two behind the consumer space, and for obvious reasons… they normally have custom software, and a large embedded userbase. For instance, I know for a fact that one company didn’t switch off of Netscape 4 completely until the 2003-04 timeframe (as nuts as that sounds).
That being said, I don’t think that Apple’s goal is to get that to happen anytime soon, if at all. The main concern is in the consumer space.
However, the seeds have been sown at an especially ripe time as those same companies would have eventually been forced to move to IE7 or FireFox. Apple is now primed and ready with a “Third Way”…