In case one is sitting around thinking that Mac still doesn’t deserve it’s measley 5% market share, here’s an article, posted on Friday, called BYOB: Build Your Own Browser by Andrew Anderson. Using Mac tools called WebKit that are built into the OS, Mac folks can actually create a customized, simple website browser, not unlike Netscape 4, which probably took 500,000 project hours to complete and still causes me and clients mad headaches.
this is just what we need: more browsers. in fact, let’s have a different browser for every person- that will certainly make life easier for web developers. bravo, mac, for inventing one more piece of software that no one in their right mind should ever use!
um, missing the point. The fact is, the rendering engine is the SAME. Your average web developer will be fine if they program for safari. It’s just an encapsulated set of technologies that mean a standard browser can be embedded in any app. This is an IMPROVEMENT, since people don’t have to worry about building their own mini browser. In fact, it’s exactly what Microsoft did on the Windows side with the engine of IE.
Yep, Kevan is right. Microsoft does allow this kind of technology to be developed with IE’s engine under Windows. Apple is just playing the ballgame in this case. Thanks.
The sooner I can be done thinking about Mac/IE the better.
Anyway, the way I hear it there are web standards out there, developed by very intelligent people. I’m talking about the W3C here; Microsoft and their crappy proprietary last-generation browser do NOT count as a standard. All web developers have to is build standards-compliant websites, and they will work with every browser in existence. When a developer whines about having to do more work to satisfy more browsers, that just suggests to me that he’s a bad web developer.