Apple Brings Safari to Windows - First Take

Michael Gartenberg | June 11, 2007, 02:16 PM

The most interesting news today out of the Apple's WWDC was that fact that they're porting Safari over to Windows, the first beta of is available from Apple immediately. There are two questions here, why and how.

The why is easy. As the web continues to grow in importance, the ability of your browser to work with key sites is critical. Imagine a browser that couldn't support YouTube for example. By bringing Safari over to the Windows platform and leveraging that platforms center of gravity, Apple is betting it can grow the installed Safari base (among folks who have no interest in IE and don't want to depend of Firefox) and therefore insure that Mac OS as a web platform will always have the latest and greatest Internet support as well.

Likewise, Apple also announced that Safari will be the gateway to the iPhone for developers (at least for now) and that means that it's important for Apple to be on the Windows platform as well as Mac OS. I don't think we're going to see other core parts of OS X such as any of the iLife apps make their way over any time soon.

It's not too hard to figure out the how either. At the moment, iTunes is one of the most downloaded applications. It will be interesting to see if Apple will leverage that and make Safari a standard part of the iTunes installation at some point. That act alone would immediately give Safari a big boost.

There's some obvious comparisons to Netscape vs. IE and the browser wars of the last century. While today's browser battles are being played for different stakes, they are no less important. This is a great strategic move by Apple that will push their technology further on to the Windows platform. Expect a response from Redmond.