Wow, I can't believe how many people have totally missed the significance of Apple's announcement about Safari for Windows.  I've seen a dozen blogs and major web publications describe Apple's Safari for Windows as either "igniting another browser war" or "yawning" at the announcement.  Both camps have pretty much dismissed the significance of the announcement.  And the Apple loyalists are saying to themselves "huh?  I don't get it!"

I have to admit, I was surprised by Apple's announcement today, but shortly after I installed Safari on my Vista machine, I got busy testing our own OnTime 2007 Web version to see how well it runs in Safari.  To my surprise, it runs noticeably FASTER on Safari than it does in IE or FF.  That blew me away.  But more impotantly, I was pleasantly surprised that Safari's rendering engine seems to have fixed the vast majority of the problems that the previous versions had.  Now that our developers can run Safari on Windows, it'll be significantly easier for Axosoft (and hundreds of companies like us) to support Safari in the future.  This is huge!

The Fight to Get Developers

It's not about browser market share on Windows.  In my opinion, Apple couldn't care less for the Windows platform.  It'd be happy to get 0.5% of the Windows browser market, but by making it super easy for Windows-based developers to test their apps on Safari, they ensure that all new web apps will run smoothly on iPhone and the soon-to-be-announced Safari for Apple TV.  That ensures their new platforms, which are far more important than Windows PCs, will all have smooth access to Web-2.0 based applications.

There are probably thousands of software companies out there, like Axosoft, who today decide to accelerate their support for Safari.  Fast forward 5 years and the same people who think the Safari announcement today is a yawner are going to look back and say this was a huge strategic move for Apple ensuring the success of iPhone and Apple TV.  Brilliant!

As much as I believe this to be a fight for developers, I don't discount Apple's ability to get market share on Windows.  Remember, Apple already has tens of millions of iTunes users.  If Apple truly manages to make a better browser and ties the download to iTunes, it could have a big chunk of the browser space on Windows overnight.  Whether or not this happens is really not that important.  Windows developers are going to support Safari because a) it's easy now that it's on Windows and b) they want to run their apps on their iPhones.