As much as I liked the Safari beta 4.0, I must say that I love the officially released version all the more. Mind you, it's not perfect, but over all it's very fast, polished, secure and has in addition some really wonderful and unique features, such as Top Sites.
Some claim, like Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, that it's not really the world's fastest, and he takes Apple to task for promoting it as such. Adrian gives that speed claim to Google's Chrome, which, by the way, is built on Apple's Safari's open-source project WebKit.
So far, according to AppleInsider, more than 11 million copies of Safari 4.0 final have been downloaded in the past few days, and mostly by Window users. Those are respectable numbers, but when compared with the numbers for Firefox and I.E., well, it's just a drop in the bucket, but still it's a start and a good one at that.
Also, from AppleInsider, they report:
"Safari 4 is an incredible success on Mac and Windows with more than 11 million downloads in the first three days," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "Safari users love the incredible speed and innovative features like Top Sites, Full History Search and Cover Flow."
I agree, Cover Flow, as used by Full History Search, is especially cool for viewing your history and is by far the best of the bunch. It's so much easier to find something that you were looking for instead of reading a long list of sites, which all look pretty much the same as one another. By comparison, I find that all other browsers history searches can be a real pain in the you-know-what? Visually, being able to see what your looking for it fantastic, absolutely fantastic, as Susan Boyle would say.
As great as Safari 4.0 is, and as far as it has come, can it do better - can it become the next Firefox or even the next I.E?
Well, that depends on who you ask, simply because of the fact that when it comes to Apple, there are a lot of people out there who will automatically reject anything that comes from Apple in the first place! In other words, they are bias! Personally, I never could really understand rejecting something simply because of it's source, be it from Apple, Microsoft, Google, or whom ever. The fact that Vista was crap doesn't necessarily mean that Vista 2, or Windows 7, will be crap, but unfortunately, thats the way many people view things, and it's perceptions like those that Safari has to fight against.
So, how can Apple over come such bias's; and how can Apple make Safari more of threat to other browsers? First of all, Apple has to copy and improve upon what people really like on the other browsers. And, for a lot of people, that means matching Firefox's huge library of extensions and it's high perceptions of security. As far as extensions go, they certainly can bring a lot of functionality to a browser. In the case of Firefox, so many, that if you can name it - there's probally a Firefox extension to cover it. However, as great as extensions are, one of the main reasons why I have personally switched back to Safari 4.0 from Firefox, as my main browser, was because of those very same extensions. Just as they can bring functionality, it's also true, on the other hand, that they can also bring a big performance hit, slowing down the browser and making it more buggy in the process!
Most websites are naturally created to better work with the biggest browser of them all, Microsoft's Explorer. This means that the better Safari can handle and accommodate such sites and those standards, then the better and easier it will be for Safari to convince people to switch from Explorer to itself.
Safari is fast, but it also must do everything that it can to keep on top of the speed heap. If Chrome is faster, then Apple must ensure that Safari is faster still, even it's it only a little bit faster. People love speed and because of this, the more people who have the perception that Safari is indeed the fastest, then the more inclined they will be to switch.
Features and more features! You can never have enough of them, provided that said features are also simple, easy to use and serve a real and practical purpose, and ones that really help the user to get the most from their browsing experience. CoverFlow, as used for Full History Search, is a prime example. Features, no matter how cool, of course, won't mean much if they slow down your computer, or make it less stable or more buggy. One has to be really careful here, as I found out with Firefox's seemingly unlimited number of extensions.
However, above all else, what Apple really needs to do, in my opinion, in order for Safari to gain significantly more market share would be for it's mighty PR machine to ramp up Safari's advertising. This means coughing up some pretty big bucks. A big push, however, in advertising is a rather iffy proposition for Apple. After all, spending big bucks for a product that it gives away gratis seems rather questionable at best. On the other hand, besides gaining the boasting rights to any greater market share resulting from such a massive ad campaign, Apple would also, at the same time, be exposing more and more people to everything Apple, and thus creating more mind share and generally more interest in it's hardware and software offerings.
So, can Safari really take on Explorer and Firefox and win? Can it really grab more significant market share from these two top browsers? Not only would I really love to see them do so - I also think it's entirely doable! Provided, that is, of course, as long as Apple is willing to invest not only in advancing Safari technically, but by also investing some serious bucks in a major advertising blitz. The question is, will Apple commit both the necessary funds and efforts in doing so? That's is something that I really can't answer, but I am hoping that it will do so eventually.
And that's my 2 cents 4 this Friday, June 12, 2009
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