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Patrick Shannon
06-11-2007, 08:21 PM
Online Apple nerds a few months ago (following Leopard delay): "I think I may have purchased my last Macintosh."

Same nerds after keynote today: "God, October can't come soon enough!"

I'm sitting here waiting for a Final Cut Studio installation to finish on my laptop (nearly an hour install and 30GBs, egads) so I was following along. Pretty underwhelming stuff, though...considering we saw most of it at the WWDC last year. The new Finder and Desktop is fairly nice and needed, but other than that, I don't see where the "top secret" stuff that Steve Jobs said he couldn't show last year was. He probably should have kept his mouth shut on that, just like when he said in 2003 that the G5 processor would hit 3Ghz within a year. ;) And the whole AJAX/Web 2.0 developing platform for iPhone....I'm not so sure that's exactly what developers had in mind.

But Safari for Windows is an interesting one. I guess it kind of makes sense, one advantage is that it allows web developers on Windows to test for the other side easily (could more banks and web apps now be inspired to make them work with Safari?). Second, with more exposure, it helps point out some of its flaws more easier and lights a fire under Apple's butt to fix them. Third, the whole iPhone development thing.

I certainly don't see it unseating Firefox (or even IE), but it'll compliment it well. Especially if it renders as fast as they claim and is lightweight on the system resources. I could see Safari hurting Opera, though.

I just tried Safari 3 beta on Mac and while it doesn't appear to be greatly different on the surface, it does seem to render pages faster. Not to mention they FINALLY got around to fixing a nasty bug with Flash animation whenever menus hover down over them.

wienerdog
06-11-2007, 08:47 PM
Apple decided to make Safari a cross-platform application to boost the Web browser’s market share. According to figures cited by Jobs, Safari currently captures about 5 percent of the browser market; Microsoft Explorer commands 78 percent of the market while Mozilla’s Firefox has a 15-percent share.

I wonder where Jobs got these numbers, because they don't come close to W3schools.com's stats.

Many Mac owners I know don't use Safari, and download Firefox. I've had a problem with my CSS drop-down menus over Flash content. Wonder when that will change...

So will the Windows version of Safari render code identically to the Mac version, or will we have Safari Win bugs that don't happen in Safari Mac.

It'll be a while before the market share of Safari Windows is all that relevant, but I wouldn't put it past them to promote it like crazy, with everyone downloading iTunes these days.

Patrick Shannon
06-11-2007, 08:55 PM
I've had a problem with my CSS drop-down menus over Flash content. Wonder when that will change...

As I said, no longer an issue in the new Safari, which was my biggest complaint about Safari 2. Also surprised me why Apple never released an update to fix it before now.

wienerdog
06-11-2007, 08:58 PM
As I said, no longer an issue in the new Safari, which was my biggest complaint about Safari 2. Also surprised me why Apple never released an update to fix it before now.

They were too busy developing the cross-platform v3? :)

nyc_skater
06-11-2007, 09:10 PM
Our site receives about 1 million hits/month and those percentages are pretty accurate.

Here's what my analytics says.

Safari about 1% less than what they quoted.

http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/6272/imagenm4.jpg

Patrick Shannon
06-11-2007, 09:22 PM
That's the funny thing about stats, they'll vary all over the place. Too many people follow by the W3C stats. That's great...if your users are all web developers. At my last job (we developed for older people/elderly in mind), a manager brought up the W3C stats for some argument, and my reply was "That's nice. How about OUR audience?"

If you compared the stats between, say....the GDF here, a Microsoft news website, Mac Rumors, etc., very wide array of results, I would bet.

But I think around 2-4% for Safari in "general" would be a fair estimation.

AlyCé
06-12-2007, 05:15 PM
I have never really used Safari, because well first of all I've been under the impression Safari didn't have tabs, and second of all I've been a fan of Opera. But after downloading the new Safari, I've realized how much faster it is.<3 I've heard of alot of windows-users who has experienced alot of troubles with the beta though.

Patrick Shannon
06-12-2007, 08:36 PM
I've heard about the problems too. The Mac version seems to be working just fine so far, but they've had four years to get it right already.

I've noticed a lot of unannounced little editions in Leopard on the website. For example, Front Row is now using the AppleTV interface.

I'm still waiting for some more major improvements to the Finder. Like the ability to sing about it's greatness in a musicial medley. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHO8l-Bd1O4)