Idle State

I much prefer working on a Mac to a Windows machine. Mac OS X Leopard was previewed at WWDC 2007 (World Wide Developers' Conference) and it has some great new features - which makes the view through Windows seem less like a vista and more like a sort of blurry beer-goggled view of the gutter. Steve Job's keynote is always good viewing - with some humor and also nicely balanced by the fact that not all new features are there for the sake of "productivity" - some are there just for fun.

The announcement that Safari was ported to Windows and the following rather uninspiring demonstration was, quite frankly, a waste of ten minutes of my life.

Why?

Because Safari blows.

It surprises me no end that Apple are entering into a market behind the eight ball - that is - with such a featureless, buggy and apparently insecure product. It's failings are well noted on the web, but a quick look at Apple's download page for Safari shows an astonishing list of features "Coming Soon" which should be absolutely baseline: international text, cookie management, FTP directory listings and so on - all basic features which other browsers have had for a long, long time. This will certainly do nothing to entice PC users to start using Macs - on the contrary I suspect.

To make matters worse, Apple intend to bundle Safari with iTunes. Actually - to all manufacturers: When will manufacturers desist from this idiocy? Like WGA with Security Updates, all the HP drivel-ware that you get when you simply want to install printer drivers, and iTunes when all you wanted was QuickTime? It's as insidious as web sites that insist on resizing my browser window. I want to decide what is installed on my computer. Not you. Not anyone else. Please stop.

Back to the beach.

Technorati Tags:
Software