Why Safari For Windows? Why Now?

Boy, how times change. A few years ago, when Windows users seemed doomed to live in a world in which Internet Explorer was the only viable browser option, the arrival of Safari for Windows might have been a gigantic deal. Or think back to late 2006--if Apple had announced that it had struck a deal to bundle Firefox with OS X and was discontinuing Safari development, it would have been newsworthy but not a stunner.

But this is 2007. Thanks to Firefox, browser competition is alive and well in Windows. And with Safari sitting at the heart of the iPhone, it's clear that it's a Really Important Piece of Apple Technology, not anything the company is going to axe anytime soon.

So as far as users are concerned, Safari for Windows is...well, yet another browser. A perfectly nice one, to be sure. But not one with a long list of clear advantages over the browsers Windows users already have to choose from, unless A) Steve Jobs' claims of it being really fast are true; and B) you're dissatisfied with the speed of your current browser.

(Here, incidentally, is my colleague Narasu Rebbapragada's first look at the Safari beta.)

Firefox, by almost any measure, remains the most obvious candidate to be the leading IE alternative--the amazing array of extensions available for it alone would guarantee that. And it seems like a choice between two browsers is enough to make most of the Windows-using world happy. Opera 9, a very good product in its own right, is an extremely distant third in the browser race as far as market share goes. (About 2 percent of PCWorld.com visitors use it.)

Apple, obviously, knows all this. So the more intriguing question isn't what Safari for Windows means for Windows users, but what it means for Apple. Why is the company jumping into the Windows browser wars, anyhow?

Steve Jobs, in his keynote today, said the company would like to see Safari more widely used, and that iTunes' popularity is proof that it knows how to get Windows users to download and install its software. When Narasu and I met with some Apple execs this afternoon, they touted Safari's support for Web standards, and said that the company wanted as many people as possible to use a nicely standards-compliant browser.

Far be it from me to suggest that a technology company might have ulterior motives for giving away products, but geez--Apple had to devote meaningful resources to porting Safari to Windows, and if nothing else, it's inviting security attacks it might not have if the browser had remained Mac-only. So I continue to ask myself, "What's in this for Apple?"

I don't have any definitive answers, but it does seem like a good guess that this isn't about what Safari is today, but about what it might become. It's pretty clear that we're in the early stages of a journey towards a Webby future that will leave operating systems a little less important, and browsers (as well as browser-like applications such as Adobe's AIR and browser enhancers like Microsoft's Silverlight) more so. Apple needs to have a dog in that fight, and if Safari had remained Mac-only, there would have been a limit to how far it could go.

But now Safari is the only browser that runs on two of the most important computing platforms and on a phone that surely will be a significant mobile platform. As a Mac and Windows browser, it's still more pleasant than leading-edge, but you gotta think that Apple may have plans for it that we don't know about.

And if it's serious about grabbing meaningful market share in Windows--and let's define "meaningful" as at least five percent, at least for now--it needs to do some compelling things that IE and Firefox don't. Apple being Apple, those things might relate to media--if Safari had some sort of iPod integration, or unusual media-streaming features, or tools for downloading content from the iTunes Store, it would be easier to answer the question "Why should I switch to Safari from the browser I'm using now?"

I'm done predicting what Apple will do next--like the rest of the Apple-watching world, my pre-WWDC musings didn't have much to do with what actually transpired today. But I don't think it counts as a bold prognostication to guess that the arrival of Safari on the Windows platform is less about the product as it stands in version 3, and more about a Safari 4 that contains some surprises which set it apart from other browsers. (Safari 3, incidentally, isn't even much different from Safari 2--"Safari 2.5" might have been a more appropriate name.)

UPDATE: Over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber points out another advantage to Apple of Safari's Windows version: referal fees from Google stand to make Apple millions of dollars a year.