There are some thoughts going around the Web that a version of Safari is going to be made for Microsoft Windows. Mary Jo Foley noticed in the Firefox Product Planning Guide (yes, I said Firefox) that there was some “speculation” of Apple releasing a version of Safari for Windows. This is the same guide that we used yesterday in revealing some features that are expected to be in the final release of Firefox 3.
If you looked at the Product Planning Guide that is hyperlinked above you may have been wondering where the Safari information is. Mozilla has actually changed it from saying:
Apple may have Safari on Windows with likely ties to iTunes & .Mac
to:
WebKit may be ported to Windows
Since this is a wiki you can go back and see the original version.
What it has been changed to doesn’t sound like anything special now. Actually, it sounds like what has already been done with the Swift browser. That browser is supposed to use the Safari’s rendering engine so that Web developers can accurately tell whether a website will work okay in Safari. I have used it before and for some reason the results are not the same as what I get in Safari on a Mac.
This begs the question to be asked: should Safari be available for Windows? I’m not so sure that a lot of people would migrate to Safari as their browser of choice, but I have read a lot of people who say that it is the most standard’s compliant browser available on the market. Not only that but I’m sure Apple could do an amazing job of marketing it like they do with all of their products.
Whether Apple would put Safari on Windows is another story. I think it would be a great idea because they would just be “infecting” Windows machines with more of their own products. They already have iTunes for Windows and porting their popular browser over could give Microsoft a real run for their money. Anytime someone installs iTunes they could offer to install the browser which would unleash it into a market that Firefox seems to have a hard time reaching: the casual user. Then if people love iTunes and Safari enough they might think to themselves “why am I not just using a Mac?”
In my opinion, I would love to see Safari come to Windows because the more choices there are for quality Web browser the harder companies like Microsoft will have to work to sustain their market share. I’m sure the person who posted the “announcement” on the Firefox Planning Page just confused Safari with the WebKit, but it sparked a lot of interest that Apple should look into.
News Source: Digg
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I’m more interest in this observation:
What web service providers are they referring too? Do they have someone specific in mind or is this just a hypothetical.
i doubt we will ever see safari on windows, but it is worth nothing that adobe’s apollo will be using webkit for html rendering, and that will be running on windows (and mac)…
Well that would be cool as I can test my sites, but it looks like this might not happen so I am going to have to rely on Swift coming into to beta as it’s is still too early for the browser.
Also not to mention that Apple’s Safari web browser is based on KHTML which was done by those wonderful people at KDE and looks like they are on the ball for having a fully complaint browser on the market right now.
Yep, I think they should have a Windows version of Konqueror out in no time…which would prove that Apple should be able to port Safari over to Windows without too much trouble.
Safari was forked from Konqueror some time ago, and now they are developed separately - one by KDE community, and other by Apple Inc. So those two browsers’ rendering engines are NOT the same. They are similar, but different.
Yeah, definitely. Safari has actually come a long ways in terms of development and they were supposed to share any advancements with the KDE team…but they seem to have forgotten to do that.
Well it seems that this was one rumor that actually paned out. Over 1 million copies of Safari for Windows was downloaded in 48 hours.
Wow, I had completely forgotten about this post, but it is funny how spot on it was. I heard that Apple will be offering Safari as an additional download option when users get iTunes, which should definitely help their marketshare.