How Apple’s Safari Browser May Rise To Power
Love it or hate it, Apple’s Safari web browser has started making gains in market share. These gains have been small by many accounts but I believe Safari has a couple things going for it that currently Firefox and IE can’t compete with. Its ability to be easily embedded into and modified.
This ability does not come directly from Safari but rather its open source rendering engine, Webkit. This engine has proven to be extremely competent and lightweight. It also has one of the fastest rendering times available.
Because it is easy to work with and free(as in speech and beer) it is now being used not only by Safari, but Adobe’s AIR environment and you can even run Epiphany with a Webkit engine.
The mobile environment is where this browser will really get its wings from. Currently there is nothing that can compete with it in this area. It is extremely fast and allows users to view websites as they where intended.
Perhaps more importantly it creates an easy to use interface for navigating pages that where clearly designed for much larger monitors. This is the piece that really makes the difference. It renders the page in its entirety in a zoomed out view. From there the user can simply double click on an area to zoom in. Once zoomed in you can simply move around the page, or zoom out as necessary.
This combination, if unopposed may help vault Safari into a prominent position.