There has been a lot of speculation on the Net that the main reason for Apple to release Safari on Windows is the money they can get from Google or Yahoo by directing users to their respective search engines. While there is a lot of money to be made from this rather trivial functionality (estimations put the the annual income of the Mozilla Foundation at over US$ 70 million because of their search agreement with Google), I doubt this is the main or even one of the most important reasons Apple decided to release their browser on Windows.
It is important to understand that there are many areas where Apple stands to benefit from having their browser ported to Windows.
So far, Apple’s most successful has been iTunes. With over 500 million distributed copies, the digital jukebox application is probably one of the most popular applications ever. On Mac OS X, the iTunes store view is implemented using WebKit (the core web render engine used by Safari). On Windows, since WebKit was not available, they probably had to embed IE. That means that there are serious limitations to what Apple can do with the look and feel of their music store. By releasing Safari on Windows (and hence WebKit), iTunes can now use the same web engine on both platforms. This simplifies web development and allows Apple to use many of the advanced HTML features not available on IE. Safari 3 also offers great integration with Quicktime which will allow for better video support inside the store. Once Apple releases Safari 3 and bundles it with iTunes on Windows, they finally get a lot more design freedom that will help them differentiate from other music selling sites that have to support older browsers.
Another area where Apple should to benefit from releasing Safari 3 on Windows is their .Mac online service. Today Apple has to make sure that .Mac can be used on any web browser. Developing the online .Mac mail reader application must have been extremely complex because of substantial differences between the main browsers. Now that Apple offers Safari on Windows they could decide to drop support for other browsers. This would allow them to save money, release new services more quickly and offer an enhanced user experience. Dropping support for IE is something most Apple .Mac customers can probably live with, specially if that decision comes accompanied by new interesting services enabled by a better browser.
Finally, as many have pointed out, by increasing Safari’s market share, Apple is cornering web designers into testing their sites against that browser, which will help both iPhone and Mac sales.
This is just a short list of ideas that could explain why Apple decided to release Safari on Windows, but it certainly proves that there are many more reasons that justify porting Safari than just easy money.
June 20th, 2007 at 10:45 am
As far as I know, the iTunes store is not using WebKit. Here is an excerpt from Dave Hyatt’s blog Surfin’ Safari.
iTunes and WebKit: “Just to clear up a common misconception, iTunes does not use WebKit to render the music store. What you see when you visit the iTunes music store may look “web-like”, but it isn’t HTML, and it isn’t rendered by WebKit.”
I don’t think they had to embed IE in the Windows version. Apple is releasing Safari on Windows but it has nothing to do with iTunes.
If the Mozilla Foundation made $72 million last year thanks to the Google search box, Apple will need to multiply the number of Safari users by a factor of four (from 18.6 million to 75 million users) to generate the same amount of revenue. It could take several years, and even then, the yearly revenue would be insignificant. As a comparison, Apple’s revenue was $19.3 billion for the 2006 fiscal year, net income was almost $2 billion. For the quarter ended last March, Apple posted revenue of $5.26 billion and net quarterly profit of $770 million.
June 23rd, 2007 at 10:43 am
It’s all about the iphone! http://thenewsroom.com/details/422936?c_id=wom-bc-js
June 23rd, 2007 at 6:23 pm
AISI,
You are absolutely right, my mistake. I assumed that iTunes use webkit and I was wrong. However, you must agree that Apple would probably benefit from using WebKit inside iTunes. It must be quite a problem to author new content for the store using a proprietary format. Moving to HTML would make it easier to open up the store to new devices like the iPhone and Linux (although Apple has demonstrated again an again that they do not care whatsoever for that OS).
It seems that on June 29th Apple will have to release a new version of iTunes if they want to sell additional ring tones (that is a big business). That update could use WebKit if that really is one of the reasons they decided to port Safari to Windows. On the other hand, WebKit seems still quite buggy on Windows, and that could delay such an update to later this year (when new iPods are launched in the fall).
Thanks for correcting me, AISI.