Monday, 11. June 2007, 23:32:18
web, safari, browsers, Opera
So, Apple
just dropped a bombshell: the
Safari web browser is now available for Windows. I've posted some
general reactions at K-Squared Ramblings as to how it will benefit web developers and users overall. The most obvious is that Windows-only web designers will no longer have an excuse for not testing in Safari, which might help
break the two-browser mindset.
But what about Opera, specifically?
I remember when Apple first announced Safari for the Mac, Opera was very upset that Apple had decided to go their own way instead of licensing Opera as the new default browser. In retrospect, both sides were right: Apple was right to choose something that they could maintain themselves, without being dependent on an outside provider. (I guess they'd learned their lesson from Internet Explorer.) Opera was right that they lost a golden opportunity: as the default browser on MacOS, Safari has since become the most-used browser on that platform and the third-most-used browser overall, surpassing Opera's marketshare.
So there's certainly a risk that Safari on Windows could surpass Opera's users. However, there is one significant difference: Safari is not the default browser on Windows. It's hard to tell how much of Safari's uptake on MacOS is due to it being the default, and how much is due to people actively liking it. Personally, I have Opera, Firefox, and a half-dozen other browsers on my PowerBook, but when I fire that box up, I generally use Safari.
If you look at the functionality available in a base install, from simplest to most complex, it probably starts with Safari, runs through Firefox and IE, then finishes with Opera. Firefox has a wide array of extensions available -- in fact, it's pretty much known for them. Safari isn't
nearly as extensible.
You can't install something that will add mouse gestures, for instance.I suspect that, at least at first, the audience for Safari on Windows will consist mainly of the following groups:
- Web Developers
- Dual-platform users who are used to Safari on Mac
- People who just want a basic browser and don't want bells and whistles, but don't want IE for some reason
If anything, I think Firefox has more to worry about than Opera. For every Firefox user who tricks out his browser with every 1337 extension he can find, there are probably many who just wanted something more stable than IE, or faster than IE. There's a vocal faction of Firefox users who are frustrated with its performance. I don't know why they haven't jumped ship to Opera, but depending on how much memory Safari uses when it gets out of beta, it might prove a threat on that front.
Further reading:
Tuesday, 28. November 2006, 00:49:37
Opera, safari, standards, html
...
From time to time the idea is put forth that Opera needs to start dealing with bad code. There are two problems with that view:
- Opera already deals with quite a bit of "bad code" (but there's always room for improvement)
- Just dealing with bad code isn't enough: you have to deal with it the same way someone else does.
#2 is the tough part.
The rules for dealing with good code are, for the most part, specific. If you encounter well-formed HTML, you can be reasonably sure you know what the author meant. But there are very few rules for dealing with bad code. Trying to "deal with it" means trying to guess what the author meant, and sometimes different assumptions are equally as likely.
Example:
<p><b>Here's some text</i> and here's some more.</p>
Did the author close the non-existent italics by mistake, meaning to close the bold? Or did he open bold by mistake, intending to open italics? Or is the closing italics tag left over from copy-and-paste? Depending on what assumptions the browser makes, it should display it as:
Here's some text and here's some more.
Here's some text and here's some more.
Here's some text and here's some more.And that's just a simple example. It gets wilder when you throw in issues like inline vs. block elements. A paragraph should never appear inside a tag for text formatting, like bold or italic. By all rights, starting a new paragraph (or more precisely, ending the previous one) should also revert to plain formatting. But a lot of old pages expect the formatting to continue into the next paragraph, because way back when, a P tag was a double-line break, not a container.
Now, suppose that Browser A always makes the first assumption, and Browser B always makes the second. If someone tests their code in Browser A, and it happens to be what they want it to do, they won't necessarily notice that their code is broken. The result: the site looks wrong in Browser B, and the page author -- who thinks the page is fine, since he tested it in Browser A -- blames Browser B.
Multiply that scenario by millions of pages and you have a large chunk of the web as we know it today.
So the solution isn't just to "handle bad code." It's to handle that bad code
in the same way that the dominant browser handles it. And since there's no document you can look to for guidance, that means taking every possible chunk of bad code, running it through the other browser, and seeing what it does to it.
And there are a
lot of ways to break code!
Even Microsoft did this back when IE was new. At the time, lots of people were writing broken code and testing it by seeing whether it looked right in Netscape. So IE had to make the same assumptions Netscape did on certain things. Once IE became established, they diverged.
Some relevant articles:
I plan on refining this post from time to time.
WIDGETIZE