New look at old, boring controversy

Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Mar 22, 2008 at 10:38 PM

With the OS X progression proving more competent than Windows Vista and the sequelae, everyone suffers platform anxiety. Or platform smugness, if you’re on the other side. Apple today made available it Safari 3.1 browser for Windows, in a manner too sly and intrusive for some competitors’ tastes. But whatever the ethics or etiquette of delivery, I can see why Apple did it. It changed my mind, anyway, in that on at least one important dimension—maybe the most important one—Apple software simply runs better. As if it runs on code somehow ‘better,’ because what else could be involved. This version of Safari is written for Windows, so no excuse about the advantages of a younger operating system succeed.

I am using it now, as the speed for me makes up for the lack of features. Firefox 3, beta 4 is supposed to be almost as fast, but I find no comparison. Safari is instantaneous. I don’t know whether the bottleneck in all the other products—from IE 8 to Opera 9.5 (second to latest beta) to the aforementioned Firefox 3, lies in the speed of reading html or the speed of connection [could that be?] . If it derives its speed _from_ it lack of features, that would be somewhat disappointing.

This being the kind of flagship product that sets a model for developers, it sets a very high standard for software performance. It also conveys a very deep-seated minimalist design philosophy. Personally, I find the aesthetics boring, compared to what I can supply on Windows with Window Blinds. But the minimalist design philosophy cuts much deeper than that. Efficiency is prized over power. I think that might be of the essence of what you buy into when going Macintosh, the emphasis extending even to hardware design, where minimalist mouse-design tradition now means that the user must hold down the control key to open in a new tab with one click.

But it is possible that software that runs well is more important than features. With regard to browsers, that’s my momentary sense.