Should Apple Discontinue Safari or Double Down?

8 July 2011 by Matthew Gertner - Category: Rants and Ruminations

The recent news that Chrome has passed 20% browser market share (according to StatCounter) was impressive for a browser that hit the market just 30 months ago. One subtle point that was hardly mentioned in the tech press is that, as the same narrative was trotted out time and time again (Chrome surging, Firefox holding firm, Internet Explorer in decline), there was nary a mention of Safari. Is Apple’s browser just that thing that comes preinstalled on your Mac, or does it have wider strategic significance for the company?

Safari is actually doing pretty well… on the Mac. If StatCounter is to be believed, OS X was used by 6.36% of web surfers over the past three months while 5.04% of users had Safari. According to Stat Owl, share for Safari on Windows has been hovering around 0.5%, so this means that around 80% of Mac users are sticking with Safari and pretty much no one else is using it. Safari will continue to gain share as Windows users switch to Mac and personal computers users switch to tablets and smartphones, but on current trends it will take ages until it is a player in the broader web space. On a personal note, we do a bunch of add-on development projects for Firefox, Chrome and IE every month here at Salsita, but we’ve received precious few inquiries about Safari and none of these has ever turned into a real project.

There are three broad options for Apple moving forward:

  • Accept the status quo. Continue to push for market share with Mac and iOS and treat Safari as a necessary component of the operating system.
  • Switch to another browser. The obvious candidate is Chrome since it is based on the same Webkit engine as Safari. It will be a cold day is hell (or Cupertino), of course, when Apple adopts technology from arch-rival Google. But it would be very much in character to co-opt Chromium (the open-source underpinnings of Chrome) and rebrand it. They could invest their engineering muscle in one-upping Google on its own territory instead of maintaing their own JavaScript engine, extensions ecosystem and so forth.
  • Push Safari on Windows. Apple clearly had at least some inclination to pursue this path back in 2008 when they started including Safari in the iTunes autoupdater on Windows. This apparently didn’t work out so well, but Apple could take a cue from Google and find a convincing way to market Safari as somehow better than other options. But with Chrome having taken up the mindshare slack as the streamlined, fast and secure alternative to Firefox’s open source message of freedom and IE’s “it was on the computer when I bought it”, it’s hard to see what kind of niche Safari could carve out.

Naturally the most likely path, by far, is the first: stick with the status quo. Apple doubtless believes that Safari market share will take care of itself as iOS slowly takes over the world. Safari 5 (released over a year ago) has mostly me-too features (HTML5, improved performance, extensions). The one true innovation is Safari Reader. Combined with iOS 5′s Reading List, it could turn into something revolutionary: a browser tailored towards reading which keeps track of what you are and will be reading and syncs the list across all your devices (imagine if Apple combined this with iBooks and Newsstand to produce a unified reader). If the future of browser is, as I believe, in spinning off more focused applications that use web technologies where appropriate, then Apple might indeed do well to treat the browser as a commodity, spin off Safari Reader as a separate product and look for other products that can be carved off the the browser that have more scope for differentiation.


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COMMENTS
  • http://Website comdot

    Isn’t Safari Reader just Arc90′s Readability product anyway? Open source bookmarklet.

    • http://www.salsitasoft.com/ Matthew Gertner

      I don’t believe Readability has Safari Reader’s feature to combine multiple pages into one long scrolling text. It’s a combination of this type of innovation along with integration in the browser and with Reading List that makes this such a compelling possibility.

  • http://Website Pete

    Safari is the strategic platform for the whole Apple ecosystem. This implies 100% market share on the IOS platform. So, they do not need to care about the windows market share. Actually I’m wondering why they release a windows version at all…

  • http://Website Bod

    I believe roughly 0.8% of Safari’s share by Statcounter’s measure is actually iPad usage which means it’s more like 60% of Mac users that stick with the installed browser, rather than 80%.

  • http://Website dbcooper

    Nah, Readability has always done that. I believe that Safari Reader is actually based on Readability’s code.

  • http://Website Erunno

    I think that one important aspect (especially for iOS) to consider is that by having their own browser it allows them to better control their platform by either implementing browser features or purposefully keeping them out. The development of the web platform into a fully-fledged development environment is something which Apple can only influence slightly with to their work in standards bodies but which has the potential to circumvent their own in the long run. Should the web platform become a danger to other parts of their ecosystem (e.g. games in the app store) they can intentionally cripple the browser to keep this competition at bay, assuming that iOS retains enough desirable characteristics which put it ahead of the competition despite such drastic steps.

  • http://Website David

    Matthew: Readability does do that. I believe the feature was made public very soon after Safari started doing it. Try it and see. It works quite well, in my experience.

  • http://www.salsitasoft.com/ Matthew Gertner

    Cool, I didn’t realize they had added that.

  • http://Website the_dees

    WebKit is the worst engine of the four big engines.
    Their CSS and DOM support is far worse than that of current IE, Firefox and Opera.
    Ending 2010, WebKit passed less than 90% of the CSS 2.1 Test Suite which became a Recommendation this year.

    Apple and Google should start to put a lot of manpower into Webkit. Look at Microsoft, their IE development team is really big and that’s why they’re the most standards compliant browser now (something no one dared to even dream of ten years ago – I was there).

    That those two mighty big companies can only bring forth such a browser with mediocre standards support apparently reflects their real interest in the health of the web.

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  • http://Website Colin

    The whole point of releasing Safari for Windows in the first place was so that Web developers targeting iOS would have a platform for testing.

  • Anonymous

    Bundle Chrome with Mac OS-X. Everyone happy!
    Apple gets their own engine, Google gets their browser on more computers, users get a better browser.