Memo to Apple: Drop Safari, Fix Firefox

John Gruber takes Tim Bray to task for his anti-Apple commentary, and Tim counterpunches. I don’t know how he does it, but Tim has a talent for provoking these awesomely drawn out interblog battles. I’m jealous. I hardly ever get debunked and disparaged.

Anyway, as far as this debate is concerned, I basically agree with Tim (as usual). Apple’s supersecretive behavior is spooky, and I have a hard time believing that taking your die-hard fans to court is good PR. But what really struck me about this exchange was Tim’s original point: his dumping of Safari for Firefox. I don’t use a Mac, so I don’t know what I’m talking about (no surprises there). But if you ask me, Apple should drop Safari completely and launch a Googlesque Firefox charm offensive.

Why? It all boils down to the other point raised by John in his piece, in reference to a recent essay by Paul Graham: hard-core hackers are starting to migrate to the Mac. This resonated with me as a prototypical Windows hacker. Yes, I admit it, I kinda sorta wanna switch over to the Mac as well. I’m not a Unix guy so that isn’t really a consideration for me (oops, guess I’m not a “great hacker“). What I care about is that a) the Mac hardware and software both look so wicked cool, b) Windows is a bloated mess and c) there are less and less things I do that require me to be on Windows.

For years I’ve resisted moving over to a Mac because I need to develop software for Windows. My users are on Windows, so I have to be. Then I wrote my first Firefox extension. And lo and behold, for the first time in my life I have Mac users. This is why Apple should be Firefox’s biggest fan. The more popular the Firefox platform becomes, the easier it will be to tempt developers like me to move over to the Mac. Apple is famously susceptible to Not Invented Here syndrome, which makes it hard to imagine them dropping Safari in favor of Firefox. Too bad, since Firefox’s development tools suck big time. Apple, with its legion of usability and design geniuses, could help fix this, and in so doing have a huge influence in turning Firefox into the Windows killer that it has the potential to be.

Oh well, here’s hoping.

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2 Comments

1. As a Linux user at work and Mac user at home, I’ve found Firefox’s lack of polish on OSX to be very frustrating. However, the newer 1.0+ versions really are a big improvement. So I agree that Firefox is preferable to Safari if you’ve come from using it on another platform. However, in terms of integration, Safari is still way ahead. For example, it can’t currently using OSX “services”, which can be compared to extensions that can be used across many applications.

   As for your “Not Invented Here syndrome” comment, I think you’re a little unfair. Safari’s HTML engine is heavily based on the open-source KHTML rendering engine. The KHTML v Mozilla question was debated countless times when Apple announced their intention to produce their own browser. I believe they selected KHTML as the code was cleaner and the browser was lightweight: the Mozilla project was in a bit of a quandry at the time. Perhaps if they had to make the decision now, they might choose differently.
   But they’re unlikely to dump a browser in which they’ve invested a considerable amount of time and money. After all, it’s a solid browser with enough features for the average non-technical user.

   Having said all that, I’m typing this from Firefox

   Comment by Dan — 4/8/2005 @ 1:57 am

2. It is a bit more complicated than that - the rendering engine of Safari which you rightly say is based on KHTML is embedded into the OS as WebCore, allowing any application easy access to great standards compliant rendering engine *across* the OS.

   I’m typing this in Net News Wire, but I bet they didn’t have to build their entire browsing architecture to get here.

   Comment by paulpod — 4/8/2005 @ 3:49 am

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