Paul Tow

Steve Jobs’ announcement of Safari for Windows at the WWDC yesterday was puzzling to many. What was in it for Apple as a business? iTunes for Windows made sense because of increased iPod sales and iTunes Store purchases, but what could Apple possibly stand to gain from porting a web browser? After giving it some thought, nine possible reasons came to mind.

1. First and foremost, the iPhone uses Safari, and the only way for third party developers to develop for the iPhone is through web apps. Having Safari on Windows helps more people develop for the iPhone, which makes for happier iPhone users and perhaps more iPhone sales.
2. Apple makes millions of dollars from people using the search box in the browser’s toolbar. I believe that Mozilla made something like $50 million dollars last year from the Google search in Firefox. It’s very profitable, and with version 3 they’re also adding Yahoo.
3. Bookmark syncing between Safari on OS X and Safari on Windows (Bootcamp, work computer, multiple computers, etc.) is another incentive for people to pay $100 a year for .Mac.
4. Simplifying development of the iTunes Store.
   • In Mac OS X, the Safari rendering engine is actually separated from Safari itself into a framework called WebKit that’s used by many different OS X apps, third party software included.
   • Apple wants the iTunes store to look identical in both Mac and Windows versions of iTunes.
   • The KHTML rendering engine for the longest time could not be used on Windows because it required certain Unix roots. This has only fairly recently been resolved.

   For these reasons, Apple has had to maintain two separate rendering engines: one for WebKit and one for iTunes. Apple has always bundled QuickTime with iTunes because it’s what handles the actual grunt work of media playback. They’ll be bundling Safari with iTunes for Windows, and I think that in the future iTunes may use the Safari rendering engine for the iTunes store. That would simplify things for Apple.

5. From a fairly long term point of view, this is also about ensuring Apple’s relevance. In the future, it may very well be the case that the web browser becomes your real platform for your apps, and your OS may not matter as much. Apple will be able to offer web apps to Mac users and Windows users. Also, because the KHTML rendering engine used by Safari comes from Konqueror (a browser/file manager for the popular KDE desktop environment for Linux), users of all three major OSes could be potential customers. .Mac could even be the way to access these web apps.
6. More exposure to Apple products to Windows users mean more potential switchers, although obviously Apple has to be careful about what they make available so as to not diminish the point of switching entirely.
7. More web site compatibility with Safari.
8. No need to promote a competitor (Firefox) to Windows users wanting to develop for the iPhone.
9. The Apple employees may have wanted Safari for themselves for when they have to use PCs. They are a major Windows software developer after all.

If you’ve thought of some reasons as well, I’d love to hear them.