Safari on Windows?

[Note: This post was written on June 11th, 2007 but I was playing with settings on it and apparently set it to not appear until June 2008. Here it is now for your reading.]

So today Apple, Inc. announced that it’s browser, Safari, would be making itself available on the Windows platform.In addition, Steve Jobs announced that Safari (And more specifically HTML/AJAX technologies) would be the primary development platform for the iPhone.

While I’m not a mac user [yet], both of these announcement excite me from the web development point of view.

Single System Testing

Right now, web developers on Windows have a lot of trouble testing web sites across platforms. Sure, I have various versions of IE at my disposal and multiple versions Firefox (Which spans cross-platform) and I have a handful of Linux lice CDs at my disposal for testing with as well. I also frequently use BrowserCam to do testing on remote machines (Mostly screen captures) but as nice as screenshots are, it’s nothing compared to my Windows and Linux testing which allows me to click around and play with the site as I intended it.

While I don’t see myself using Safari on a day-to-day basis, I’m glad to have it installed as part of my regular routine for testing code I release.

iPhone’s Killer App?

It’s only been about 3 hours since the end of the keynote, but already people are saying that by not making an SDK available for the iPhone, and relying solely on web technologies, Apple has shot themselves in the foot and killed any chance for a Killer app to be established on the iPhone. Perhaps I’m alone here… But it’s my feeling that Safari is iPhone’s killer app.

If all of the development needs to stay within Safari, and more developers (Both Mac and PC now) have access to safari for testing their sites and services on, this means that more Safari/web-based applications will be ready for the launch of the iPhone. As a web developer, I couldn’t be more excited about this. Sure, we all knew Safari would be on the phone and would be rendering pages the same as it does on it’s non-mobile brother, but now we have confirmed that all of the JS effects, features, functions and code will be there awaiting us too. Steve said we could develop today and be ready for final testing on the 29th. Why couldn’t we be ready for the 29th alongside launch.

I don’t think people will need to wait long to discover that a full-blown Safari, with all of the JS and AJAX tools we need is going to sit front and centre on the iPhone, and with Safari on OSX and Windows to speed things along, development will be more seamless across all three platforms. And that will be sweet