June 11, 2007: At Apple’s Worldwide Builders Convention, CEO Steve Jobs unveils Safari 3 for Home windows, bringing the corporate’s net browser to PCs for the primary time.
Apple pitches Safari because the world’s quickest and easiest-to-use net browser, able to rendering net pages as much as twice as quick as Web Explorer and 1.6 occasions quicker than Firefox. Safari for Home windows will final till 2012, however by no means turns into a serious participant on Microsoft’s dominant working system.
Safari for Home windows arrives
The arrival of Safari on Home windows didn’t mark the primary time Apple made its software program accessible to PC customers. 4 years earlier, Jobs begrudgingly agreed to port iTunes to Home windows. On the time, he likened the transfer to “giving a glass of ice water to anyone in hell.”
The choice to make a Home windows model of iTunes made excellent sense, nevertheless. It meant that the iPod music participant was now not unique to Mac homeowners, but it surely broadened the person base significantly.
In idea, porting Safari to PCs may have achieved the identical factor. Home windows customers massively outnumbered Mac customers. Having a bigger variety of individuals utilizing Apple’s net browser was a method of carving out market dominance in one other space.
“We expect Home windows customers are going to be actually impressed once they see how briskly and intuitive net shopping could be with Safari,” mentioned Jobs in a press launch saying the launch. “Lots of of tens of millions of Home windows customers already use iTunes, and we stay up for turning them on to Safari’s superior shopping expertise too.”
Apple wasn’t the one firm making an attempt to deliver a browser to a mass viewers, although. The next yr, Google launched its freeware Chrome net browser, accessible on Mac, Home windows and Linux alongside cell working programs. At present, Chrome is the world’s hottest net browser by a big margin.
You may watch Steve Jobs introduce Safari for Home windows on this “yet another factor” clip from WWDC 2007:
Safari: Not nice on Home windows, both
The shortage of success for Safari on Home windows, then, stemmed from Apple’s implementation. The browser supplied a couple of neat options, however Apple hailed Safari’s pace as the primary breakthrough. The corporate additionally promoted Safari’s SnapBack characteristic, which supplied one-click entry to an preliminary search question.
As well as, Safari boasted resizable textual content fields and personal shopping to make sure that details about a person’s shopping historical past wasn’t saved. The issue was that Safari merely wasn’t pretty much as good as loads of different browsers on the market.
“Who of their proper thoughts would run Safari on Home windows?” requested Wired in an op-ed printed the next day. “Safari sucks,” the piece continued. “A number of Mac customers gained’t run the browser (I’m one among them), so why would anybody run it on Home windows?”
Safari suffered from some huge limitations, reminiscent of its refusal to just accept plugins and its failure to recollect which tabs you had open after closing it. Many customers complained of application-crashing bugs, which have been the antithesis of Apple’s “it simply works” philosophy.
Cult of Mac’s reviewer wasn’t blown away, both:
“Pace isn’t essentially a measure of high quality. Particularly, Home windows Safari generally decides to ‘easy’ the textual content on a given web page into an unrecognizable black line — no textual content. If, for instance, you go to my different weblog, you’ll word that the entire headlines are simply plain lacking. At Fb, a pal request become a web page stuffed with incoherent squiggles. I’ve by no means seen pages render so improperly in my life. It was like visiting an alternate 1995 in Netscape Navigator 1.1 the place individuals devoted net pages to their favourite horizontal strains as a substitute of to puppies.”
The top of the street for Safari on Home windows
In the end, Safari continued on Home windows by means of Could 2012. Alongside the launch of OS X Mountain Lion, Apple launched Safari 6.0 for Mac. Sadly, the Home windows model of Safari didn’t get the replace. The browser quietly disappeared from Apple’s web site.
By this level, the iPhone‘s dominance meant Safari counted for upward of 60% of cell web-browsing visitors. Nonetheless, it nonetheless represented lower than 6% of desktop visitors.
In all, this experiment proved a noble failure for Apple.
Did you ever use Safari on a PC?
Did you ever strive Safari on a Home windows PC? Do you suppose Apple may have made this mission a hit? Tell us within the feedback beneath.
