Chinwag's Old Blog: Apple's New Safari

It's been a long time since anyone's launched a new web browser, but that changed this week with the announcement of Safari. It's a brand spanking new web browser based on open source software, which has racked up over 300,000 downloads in it's first few days. Not bad at all, and it looks like Apple have continued the innovation they've shown in recent times, with improvements to standard browser features like bookmarks, searching and downloads. Apple are claiming lightning fast speed, but sadly unless you're Mac OS X you won't be able to go on 'Safari' yourself.

Whilst the web designers the world over are, no doubt, rushing to Apple's website to sample the delights of Safari, their enthusiasm must be tempered by the fact that there will be another set of compatibility tests to go through on their next job. Still, since Internet Explorer's market share passed the 90% mark clearly only the like's of Apple would take on the might of Microsoft.

Safari's impact will be watch closely, although it'll be limited to the Apple community at the moment, whilst it is closely tied to the Mac OS X system. This release, however is the most widespread and consumer-friendly demonstration of a trend that's been growing steadily in the business community for the last few years. Namely, commercial software companies taking their lead from the open source movement and developing cutting edge and most importantly, user-friendly products.