What's Apple's Safari strategy?

Stephen Withers
Friday, 15 June 2007 14:55

Business IT - Technology

Windows doesn't really need another browser, so why is Apple porting Safari from Mac OS X to Windows?

The answer is market share.

With Safari, Apple currently has less than 5 percent 'web share' according to recent figures from Net Applications, with other browsers - primarily Firefox, but also Camino and Opera - taking nearly a quarter of the Mac's platform share.

Whether 75 or 85 percent of Mac users actually use Safari is neither here nor there. Even if the Macintosh's share of the market is growing, current levels of use are not enough to encourage many web designers and developers to check that their pages work with Safari unless their target market is particularly Mac oriented or especially vocal.

I'm not going to get into a debate about which browser most closely supports the relevant standards, but as long as there are any significant differences in the way major browsers handle the code they're fed, minority browsers like Safari are going to be a nuisance that many web developers would prefer to overlook.

It's just that Apple's about to start selling this thing called the iPhone, which uses Safari as its web browser. Not only that, but initially Web 2.0 applications will be the only way non-Apple developers can get their software onto the iPhone.

The company could quickly find itself selling more iPhones than Macs, but that would only mean Safari had perhaps a 10 percent web share - not really enough to impact on the IE/Firefox hegemony.

But if Safari on Windows could attract another five percent, then Safari is snapping at Firefox's heels, and web developers would have less justification for ignoring it. Steve Jobs seems to think it will come at the expense of Firefox, but we would be amazed if it didn't attract some Internet Explorer users.

With Macs - especially MacBooks and MacBook Pros - becoming more commonplace in corporate environments, you can see that IT staff might be keen to encourage the use of one cross-platform browser to minimise support loads. If Apple does a good job, that could be Safari rather than Firefox - but either way it would be IE that misses out. (Unless you think they'll recommend IE under Parallels or VMware instead.)

So why has Apple released a beta of Safari for Windows that some people are describing (unfairly in our view) as being of alpha quality?

Those Web 2.0 developers with an eye on the iPhone need a way of testing their apps on Safari now if they are going to be ready for the iPhone's release at the end of this month. They probably wouldn't go out and buy a Mac if they don't already have one, but installing a pre-release copy of the Windows version isn't much of a hardship.