I must admit to raising an eyebrow when I saw the release of Safari 3 Beta for Windows. I then read a very negative opinion of it in Mac User. The premise of the argument was that by giving Safari to the PC (i.e. the masses but a Mac-ite would never admit to that) that this would encourage the dreaded Hacker to target Safari and therefore the Mac. I think there is some merit to that argument but don’t really believe it is a massive deal (I bet I’ll be eating my words in the future now) because;
- The browser had better be sandboxed and besides the underlying OS are so different you’d have to target the Mac, although granted once you break in on one platform the same code would probably work on the other.
- Mac Users need to take security seriously. Apple were so ***** stupid with their advertising about no viruses, I hope someone sues them when the get a virus.
- Many web sites fail in Safari because they are aimed at the masses and a large number of developers simply don’t have access to a Mac (and therefore Safari) to test the site on. It is for that reason that I only ever use Firefox on the Mac.
So the bottom line for me is if Apple want me to use Safari then I need more site support for it. That means making it standards compliant and allowing site developers to test it. Therefore shipping a Windows versions makes a lot of sense to me.
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