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Windows Users Don't Care About Safari

Will Windows users switch to Safari? The new version has some intriguing features, but there are already several great browsers for Windows. Fortunately for Apple, it doesn't have to win a lot of market share for Safari on Windows to be a winner.

Apple's announcement on Monday that it's ported Safari to Windows was, at first, a head scratcher. Why bother? The Windows platform has many fine browsers -- Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, and Opera, to name three. Safari isn't even the best browser for the Mac. Apple seemed to be adding a me-too product to the browser ranks.

Digging deeper, things start to make a little more sense. Apple isn't talking about bringing the current Safari to Windows -- the version on Windows will be the new version, version 3, now in beta. Version 3 has several intriguing new features for tabs, searches, and forms.

Users can reorder tabs by dragging them around. They can drag a tab out of a browser window and use it to start a new window. The browser provides improved searching on individual pages. And, in a feature that will be a real treat for people who participate in Web forums, the browser has resizable text input fields for Web forms.

Moreover, Apple boasts that Safari renders Web pages significantly faster than either IE7 or Firefox 2.

But still: The features Apple brags about with Safari, or very similar features, are available either standard or with browser extensions in Firefox.

And, as for performance ... I'm going to go out on a limb here and say it just doesn't matter much. We're not living in the days when a 28.8-Kbps modem was standard; most of us have high-speed Internet connections at home and in the office. I don't really care about page-rendering speed, and I don't hear about other people caring either. (People do care about throughput for multimedia files, of course, but that's a whole different matter.)

I'm not predicting a rush for people to adopt Safari on Windows.

So what's Apple up to?

I'm guessing this may be about the iPhone. The iPhone is going to run Safari, and Apple will allow developers to write Safari apps that run on the iPhone. Windows users may need to run Safari to get access to some synchronization features with iPhone and the desktop. Moreover, even a sliver of Windows market share will give Safari a huge boost in the raw numbers of its installed base, which would make Safari a more attractive platform for developers and could increase the range of applications available for the iPhone.

What do you think? Why is Apple bringing Safari to Windows? Do you think it will win much browser market share? Do you plan to use it?

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