Why Safari for Windows - An Independent Take...

At WWDC'07 last week, Apple Inc. surprisingly announced the Safari browser for Windows. Why would Apple spend time developing another web browser for the Windows platform while at the same time delaying Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X to late fall this year?

Some say this will allow Windows developers to test iPhone web applications before its release, others that Apple want in on the share on search revenue from Google and Yahoo!, which are implemented in the browser itself. All are possible reasons but is it worth the effort?

Here's another take on why Apple is going into the browser war as strongly as they are. First, a short background:

One of the new features in Mac OS X Leopard is something called resolution independence, which allows an end-user to scale the user interface to a factor of her choice. This will be increasingly important as screen definition will go up, while the physical screen size remains the same, resulting in elements on the screen becoming smaller and smaller, and at a certain point in-usable. Apple have recently upped the maximum resolution of their Macbook Pro 17" model to 133 pixels per inch (PPI) from around 100 before. Upcoming Macs will likely follow this race and ship with high definition screens that require the OS to scale accordingly. The iPhone will for example sport a 166 PPI screen.

So, the OS will handle the adaptation for applications and its own interface, but what about the web? There is no real web standard for resolution independence, and for sure no one that works together with the OS and hardware it's running. If Apple can take the lead and develop the first multi-platform browser with built-in resolution independence, they will have a huge advantage as high definition, high PPI screens becomes widely available. Given that Apple implemented it own sub pixel rendering engine into Safari for Windows also hints that things are going in this direction.

Of course, this will also require designers to take screen definition into account when designing web applications, but with a browser that takes care of scaling, this will be limited to supplying high resolution graphics that still looks good when scaled up to a certain factor.

Is the web ready to go from pixels to flexible scalability?

Apple's Safari

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