Safari Beta for Windows Vista/XP

[Billfred]

Originally Posted by Bill Moore

The real question is "Why did Apple decide to do this?"

There isn't a need to move their browser onto a Windows platform, there are already a decent general browser (IE) and one that can be finely tweaked to a users content (Firefox). Even Mac folks don't consider Safari to be the nirvana of browsers. Apple will not capture market-share of anything by promoting Safari on a Windows machine. They would be much more effective porting their iMovie or iPhoto software instead -- either of those could bring a market-share blip.

Apple pulled their OS programming engineers earlier this year off Mac OSX 10.5 to help get the iPhone out the door by the end of this month. More than likely, just as iPod uses iTunes on a Windows machine, Apple needed to have an interface to sync the iPhone, and Safari on Windows may be that software. We'll find out on June 29.

What other reasons would Apple have to introduce a general browser onto another platform that already has multiple options for users? Where do you speculate that Apple is headed with this thing?

Daring Fireball, a Mac blog that I read, posted his theories. They make a lot of sense to me:

There are a bunch of good secondary reasons why Apple developed and released Safari for Windows:

• More Safari users means better support for Safari from web developers. The more popular Safari for Windows gets, the less likely it is that a big new web app is going to be released without first-class support for Safari on day one.
• Safari for Windows makes it easier for Windows-based web developers to write web sites that are optimized for Safari on iPhone.
• The “show them how nice Apple apps are and some of them will decide they should just switch to a Mac” effect.

But the primary reason is simply money. Safari is a free download, but it’s already one of Apple’s most profitable software products.

It’s not widely publicized, but those integrated search bars in web browser toolbars are revenue generators. When you do a Google search from Safari’s toolbar, Google pays Apple a portion of the ad revenue from the resulting page. (Ever notice the “client=safari” string in the URL query?)
The same goes for Mozilla (and, I presume, just about every other mainstream browser.) According to this report by Ryan Naraine, for example, the Mozilla Foundation earned over $50 million in search engine ad revenue in 2005, mostly from Google.

Besides, they've gotten iTunes to spread like wildfire, why not Safari?