It’s not infrequent that someone at the Motley Fool writes something stupid about Apple. But a Daniel Bailey piece titled “Is It Time for Apple to Shut Safari Down?” takes the cake. A really horrible cake frosted with factual errors.
There is little to no innovation coming from Apple for Safari…
Totally! It’s almost like they’ve stopped developing it! This is a frequent silly pundit gag. Write up an article about how bad something sucks right before it’s going to be updated. You’ll only be right for a few days but, hey, that beats your usual track record!
In the big picture, Safari and Opera are irrelevant in the browser market today.
Of course, that isn’tentirely [sic] true.
Or true at all. The numbers Bailey uses are from StatCounter which consistently give the lowest values for Safari of any of the services that track browser share. Browser relevance, of course, doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with market share. Browser relevance doesn’t even necessarily have relevance anymore. If you’re coding to a particular browser instead of to web standards, you’re doing it wrong.
This article is like peeling an onion of wrongness. Every time you take away one layer of something that was wrong, you find another wrong layer right beneath it.
Safari has remained the only available browser for iOS…
Actually, there are more that the Macalope could give but he thinks he’s made his point.
…and other browsers that didn’t follow Apple’s idea of iOS apps have been blocked—including Firefox.
Uh, well, once again, Daniel, no. Technically speaking, Firefox is not blocked. What’s blocked is the Gecko engine that Firefox runs on. But, please, don’t let the 98 things you’ve already gotten wrong dissuade you from continuing to type more things that are wrong.
However, it is very clear that Apple has very limited interest in Web browsing these days. Safari has been surpassed by all major Web browsers in speed and mostly usability as well, and its only standout feature remains the Reader integration.
Bailey doesn’t provide a link to any speed tests and it’s difficult and unpleasant to try to disprove something someone’s just pulled from their butt, but the Macalope will suggest that your average user doesn’t really notice the 23 milliseconds. Also, Safari has historically been faster on a Mac than a PC.
Safari is disconnected from Apple’s iOS platform approach…
Something’s disconnected, alright, but the Macalope thinks it might be your brain stem.
…and it may be a good idea for Apple to simply spin off Reader…
Kinda hard to spin off open-source code they’re licensing (tip o’ the antlers to gothink in the comments at Motley Fool).
…and shut down Safari—and adopt another browser as an app that is distributed through its App Store.
Oh. Sure. They probably shouldn’t pick Chrome, though, since that’s based on WebKit which they would presumably also stop developing.
Yes, Bailey writes an entire piece on killing Safari without mentioning WebKit once.
It is somewhat obvious that Safari is an increasingly painful problem for Apple and its users in a time when all rival browsers advance at a breathtaking pace and have turned Safari into the IE of the past.
Does anyone have any idea what he’s talking about? It’s possible that Bailey is simply unaware that words have meaning and is banging them out randomly on his keyboard and they only coincidentally took the form of a piece about Safari, much like the proverbial monkeys. Again, this is part of the Macalope’s ongoing effort to attempt to provide charitable reasons for why some people feel compelled to write this nonsense.
The Macalope won’t go so far as to say Safari is the best browser. But it is a good browser and its existence means that Apple will never again have to be beholden to someone else for a core feature of its operating system.
[Editors’ Note: In addition to being a mythical beast, the Macalope is not an employee of Macworld. As a result, the Macalope is always free to criticize any media organization. Even ours.]