n01getsout.com’s blog

Safari, the web browser from Apple, is now available for download here for Windows. The interfaces is slick and it seems to load webpages quickly. It appears to use the KHTML engine for rendering webpages, which apparently has great web standards support. Nice, but unnecessary seeing as how I think it is not as good as Firefox. So the big question is “Why did Apple do it?”

Is it to challenge Microsoft’s Internet Explorer? I doubt it, as Safari is more likely to take away users from Firefox or Opera, users that have already moved away from Internet Explorer. Is it yet another Apple product that will entice users to try iTunes, Apple TV, and the new iPhone? Sure, but I doubt that is the main reason. Free publicity? Never hurts, but again not the main reason. Is Apple planning on rolling out some sort of web based service (perhaps similar to .Mac) and they are going to use Safari as the platform? I doubt it.

Since Safari is the web browser on the iPhone, some people seem to think that it is in some way a tie-in with the new iPhone. In fact, Macenstein blogged that he believes Apple released Safari so users could find the security holes before the release of the iPhone. I believe this may be the reason behind the timing, if not the release itself, of Safari on Windows.

John Gruber seems to think it is simple: cold hard cash. Google pays the Mozilla organization millions of dollars for making Google the default search engine. Safari currently has an estimated 5% of the web browser market which currently earns Apple about $25 million each year from Safari’s Google searches. If these numbers are correct, it is easy to see why it would be worth Apple effort to release Safari for Windows. I still doubt this is the main reason, however, due to the fact that Apple has never been the sort of company to try to make a few quick bucks here and there. It seems to me that there are two categories for everything they create: products or services that they feel to be vastly superior to everything else on the market, or products and services that support or accessorize the ones they feel to be vastly superior.

Robert Cringely thinks that they are trying to sell a software platform to AT&T. That, and because Steve Jobs had nothing else to report at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference.

So what do I think? I think that Apple will come out ahead with the decision to port Safari over to Windows, whatever their reason may be for doing so.