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Our Blogs Open Sauce Let Apple take you on a Safari
Our Blogs Open Sauce Let Apple take you on a Safari | Let Apple take you on a Safari |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Tuesday, 25 March 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 2 I've taken the occasional potshot at Apple when they screw up but after seeing some of their wares up close for nearly a year, I've come to appreciate a few things about the hardware and software they sell. For quite some years now, until April 2007, I had to spend at least four hours a month playing the role of a scavenger - cleaning out scumware, spyware, malware and every other bit of dross that gets accumulated on Windows computers - for my children, both of whom were using Windows. Plus I had to painfully update both their PCs. And I mustn't forget the numerous times I've had to give the triple R salute - reboot, reformat and reinstall. In April last year, I moved the younger kid to a MacBook. Since then the only time I've had to step in was during an operating system upgrade - but that too was only for a short time. In December I moved the second one to a MacBook; this child is not a tech fiend but even she does everything including the software updates on her own. I only had to intervene initially to fix a networking problem. Hence if I take a much more liberal attitude towards Apple's attempts to slip in Safari - though, as Williams pointed out, it's not sight unseen - one would understand why. Come on, how many bits and pieces does Microsoft slip in without telling anyone a thing? And all of them are mediocre products, many just marketing gimmicks, many others plain spyware. There has never been anything like the outcry which we see right now. If Apple was dumping some mediocre software on people's computers, then I would be at the head of the queue when it came to roasting them. I don't agree with stealth marketing - but I can see similar things happening on Linux too, where the project which has created Mono, an open source implementation of .NET, is quietly slipping in libraries along with updates to the GNOME desktop, libraries which appear to be making the whole desktop environment dependent on Mono. That's an open road to patent problems - and it's being provided free. I'll have more to say about that sometime next month. But for the moment, let's cut Apple some slack. A word of advice to Windows users - try a quality browser for once, if you haven't already had a go with Firefox. At times it's difficult to eat cake after swallowing stale bread for years. But please try.
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