Today in Apple history: Safari lands on Windows with a ‘meh’

June 11, 2007: At WWDC, Apple CEO Steve Work opportunities unveils Safari 3 for Home windows, bringing the company’s internet browser to PCs for the first time.

Apple pitches Safari as the world’s speediest and most straightforward-to-use world wide web browser, capable of rendering internet web pages up to twice as quick as Internet Explorer and 1.6 situations faster than Firefox. Safari for Home windows lasts till 2012, but in no way will become a major player on Microsoft’s dominant functioning procedure.

Safari for Home windows arrives

Safari’s arrival on Home windows did not mark the first time Apple manufactured its software obtainable to Laptop people. Four yrs previously, Employment begrudgingly agreed to port iTunes to Windows. At the time, he likened this to “giving a glass of ice drinking water to somebody in hell.”

The choice to make a Home windows edition of iTunes made excellent sense, having said that. It meant that the iPod was no for a longer period distinctive to Mac house owners, but it broadened the person base noticeably.

In idea, porting Safari to PCs could have performed the very same detail. Home windows end users massively outnumbered Mac users. Owning a bigger quantity of individuals applying Apple’s browser was 1 way of carving out marketplace dominance in one more location.

“We assume Windows customers are heading to be actually impressed when they see how fast and intuitive internet browsing can be with Safari,” explained Employment in a June 11 push release. “Hundreds of tens of millions of Windows people now use iTunes, and we glance forward to turning them on to Safari’s superior browsing practical experience too.”

Apple was not the only corporation striving to deliver a browser to a mass audience, while. The adhering to year, Google released its freeware Chrome net browser, which was offered on Mac, Home windows and Linux along with cellular running programs. Now, Chrome is the world’s most preferred net browser by a large margin.

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Safari: Not good on Windows, possibly

The deficiency of achievement for Safari on Windows, then, stemmed from Apple’s implementation. The browser available a couple of neat options, but Apple hailed its velocity as the key breakthrough.

On the other hand, the business also promoted Safari’s SnapBack characteristic, which presented one-simply click obtain to an original lookup query. In addition, Safari boasted resizable text fields and non-public searching to assure that info about an individual’s browsing heritage was not stored.

The issue was that Safari merely was not as fantastic as a great deal of other browsers out there.

“Who in their correct thoughts would run Safari on Home windows?” questioned Wired in an op-ed posted the subsequent working day. “Safari sucks,” the piece continued. “A large amount of Mac people will not operate the browser (I’m just one of them), so why would any one run it on Home windows?”

Safari experienced from some massive constraints, this kind of as its refusal to take plugins and its failure to keep in mind which tabs you experienced open following closing it. Quite a few users complained of software-crashing bugs, which ended up the antithesis of Apple’s “it just works” philosophy.

Cult of Mac was not blown away, possibly:

“Speed isn’t always a measure of top quality. Especially, Windows Safari occasionally decides to ‘smooth’ the textual content on a given web site into an unrecognizable black line — no text. If, for illustration, you stop by my other site, you will notice that all of the headlines are just plain lacking. At Facebook, a mate ask for turned into a site entire of incoherent squiggles. I’ve never viewed internet pages render so improperly in my existence. It was like browsing an alternate 1995 in Netscape Navigator 1.1 exactly where people devoted net webpages to their favourite horizontal traces rather of to puppies.”

The end of the road for Safari on Windows

In the long run, Safari ongoing on Windows by means of May well 2012. Alongside the launch of OS X Mountain Lion, Apple unveiled Safari 6. for Mac. However, the Home windows edition of Safari didn’t get the update. The browser quietly disappeared from Apple’s website.

By this stage, the iPhone’s dominance intended Safari counted for upward of 60% of mobile world wide web-browsing traffic. However, it continue to represented much less than 6% of desktop targeted visitors.

In all, this experiment proved a noble failure for Apple.

Did you at any time use Safari on a Computer system?

Did you ever test Safari on a Home windows Pc? Do you consider Apple could have produced this job a success? Permit us know in the reviews beneath.