“Successful browsers can steer users to vendor-favored Web sites and products. Browsers can create proprietary standards that reinforce commercial dominance (Microsoft’s philosophy) or weaken commercial strangleholds in favor of open standards (Firefox),” Lou Dolinar reports for The Los Angeles Times. “Now Apple is diving in with Safari 3.0 for Windows, a significant upgrade to a longtime favorite that formerly ran only on the Mac (now available as a beta release at http://www.apple.com/safari/download/). What’s the game plan?”
“Safari will run on most everything: Macs, PCs, iPhones, maybe eventually Apple TV… Safari should occupy roughly the same niche, vis-a-vis the iPhone, as iTunes software does to the iPod — you’ll need to run Safari to operate the iPhone, and you may want to run Safari even if you don’t own the pricey little gadget because it’s a pretty good stand-alone browser, too,” Dolinar reports.
Dolinar reports, “For programmers, Safari isn’t just a browser. It’s starting to look like a pseudo operating system that allows them to write for one standard interface and have their stuff run anywhere. It’s not clear how important this is to Apple outside of getting the iPhone off the ground, but it raises some interesting possibilities… What is fair to say is that Safari allows Apple to expand its colonization of Windows — sort of like those wasps that lay their eggs in the stomachs of their paralyzed victims.”
“How does Safari shape up as a browser? Download it yourself, free, just like I did, and find out. I’m not a power browser, and the features I use are comparable to Firefox and Internet Explorer. It is certainly prettier than Explorer, since it looks like iTunes,” Dolinar reports. “Performance-wise, especially considering the version that’s currently available for download is in beta, it seems to live up to Apple’s claims that it is twice as fast as Internet Explorer 7 at rendering pages… While there have been some reports of security bugs, it probably is still safer than IE because it does not incorporate Active X controls, those mini-programs much beloved by Web developers and spyware authors.”
Full article here.