Monday, October 08, 2007

Safari on Windows: Beyond the Browser, Apple's Decoy into Microsoft's World

On June 11th 2007, Apple introduced a beta version of Safari 3 for Windows. Safari is Apple's flagship browser, built on-top of possibly the fastest web browser engine, WebKit.

As soon as it came out, I threw it at our DWR-driven CSS-rich/DOM/script-intensive Used Cars Search results-page and compared rendering/execution speeds with IE6 on the same Windows XP machine. I counted 2+ seconds on IE6 vs 1+ seconds on Safari. Not bad for beta software, i thought, most especially software developed by Apple for its competitor's operating system.

The speed of Apple's web browser on Microsoft Windows is a testament to the maturity and strength of WebKit.

That's all dandy, but here's the twist: Safari 3 on Windows is a Decoy, something to stimulate pundit, media, and industry's attention, generate buzz, and throw them off the scent of the real story underneath. The real story here is WebKit. iTunes. Quicktime: The makings of an enabling software platform, and Safari and iTunes being the manifestation of what underlying platforms such as WebKit and QuickTime can do.

History just may prove me wrong, but I can't imagine Safari-on-Windows, in and out of itself, being part of Apple's longer-term strategic product offerings. I don't picture them running ads on TV encouraging users to switch from Internet Explorer to Safari, in a World where so many Windows users don't even know what their web browser is, and still consider it "that Internet Icon Thingie in the Start Menu".

On the Mac, WebKit enables far more than just "Safari". It also enables a whole realm of useful mini-applications, called "Widgets", running inside "Dashboard". With theoretically little added engineering resources, Apple could create great opportunities by developing a WebKit-only equivalent of Dashboard for Windows.

One of Windows Vista's "touted features" are "Gadgets", Microsoft's attempt at cloning frameworks such as Apple's Dashboard Widgets, Yahoo's Konfabulator, which provide application development platforms that leverage web standards.

Why would this be great opportunity for Apple? Bring more value to their developer community, and establish a budding footprint of Mac Developers releasing narrowly-focused applications simultaneously to Mac and Windows, thereby allowing them to multiply their audience by a factor of ... uhm ... a lot.

While Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets have access to the full underlying Cocoa APIs to provide rich functionality, there already exists a vibrant ecosystem of great widgets built solely with Web Standards, simply leveraging WebKit. A WebKit-only version of Dashboard would nicely cater to this community ... today.

"Gadgets" on Windows are a Vista-only feature. It will take some time for Vista to supplant XP. It will take some more time for Windows developers to release great "Gadgets" for Vista.

If a WebKit-only version of Dashboard was available for Windows tomorrow, Apple could release it to millions of PC users as part of one its routine iTunes updates for Windows. And many of these mini applications would be available to them, near-instantly.

By doing this, Apple would add value to its existing developer community, catch the attention of Web Developers who are on the fence as to where to start their development efforts for Mac Widgets vs Vista Gadgets, by giving them the opportunity to not have to choose.

While leveraging web standards to build useful desktop applications on both platforms would be an encouraging development, the rabbit-hole may yet go even deeper.

Consider iTunes and Safari, two applications that look absolutely identical on both Mac and PC. Are we to believe both applications live in two radically different code bases? What if Apple had internally developed an easier way to code applications for both Mac and Windows? What if XCode was to one day also produce Windows binaries?

Could this hurt Apple's competitive edge? I don't believe so, quite on the contrary. It comes down to providing even more value to their developer community, and help grow it by "reaching out to the other side". Windows users looking to switch to Mac don't make this decision based on specific pieces of 3rd-party software they'll be able to run on their shiny new Mac. They'll switch because of the iApps, which Apple doesn't have to release to Windows and likely never will, and an overall more pleasant, secure, stable, fun computing experience.

The way I see this unfold isn't thru the release of a Windows binary of the Cocoa framework. This would mean that to run Mac apps, an additional framework would need to be loaded on a Windows User's machine, much like .Net. This would strike me as redundant.

I don't either see XCode ported to Windows. It'd be rather pointless as the key audience for this product would be Mac Developers looking to release their apps on Windows, not Windows developers who are primarily .Net developers and already enjoy Microsoft's awesome IDE.

Instead, picture the ability for Mac OS X's XCode to load-up key windows APIs, translate Cocoa source-code into .Net source code, and compile the whole thing into a binary to be tested ... in Parallels ... or a Windows box nearby :).

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Here via TAB, an interesting read!

I think another possibility to consider is that Apple spent the time and money to port webkit in order to encourage development for the iPhone. Spend a little to make a lot, as they say! It's a theory anyway...

Chris Holland said...

Hey Tim, thanks for stopping-by :)

Offering a platform for iPhone development was indeed the first theory invoked for Apple porting Safari to Windows ... and I'll agree that's certainly one motivation.

I just can't help but think there's got to be a grander plan for WebKit on Windows. There just seems to be a lot of possibilities for such a robust, *and fast* platform. We'll see :)

Leonardo Damián said...

Steve Jobs soesn't care about Windows. Quicktime is on Windows because of the web. iTunes is on Windows to sell iPods. And Safari for Windows is there just because they need yo test the safari engine for the iPhone. But once the applications came out, I don't see them updating Safari so much.

James Conway said...

webkit is the core element (at least for HTML) for Adobe's "cross-operating system runtime" - AIR

Anonymous said...

Before the iPhone rumors proved true, I was speculating that Apple might be secretly working on a multi-platform version of XCode.

XCode for Linux, XCode for Windows.

Throw millions of dollars into making XCode the easiest, most intuitive development environment in existence.

I figured this would have several benefits.

First, if you could befriend a third of the Linux programmers you'd end up with a new cadre of developers familiar with your development tools.

Second, if you could seduce even 10 percent of Windows developers, you could double the amount of cross-platform apps for the Mac.

Third, since Microsoft controls their developers by controlling the tools they use, providing an alternative is a stick in their eye.