The Apple Keynote was a major letdown today - no doubt about it.
The only tangible (or virtual) news coming out of it was that Apple’s Safari browser now runs on Windows, too.
I have been playing around with it for a while now and here are my first observations:
It’s ugly - the plain gray background clashes with Vista - there is no translucency and unlike iTunes, even the close, maximize etc. buttons still look like XP
The fonts are weird - I can’t put my finger on it, but the smoothing is too much for me.
No automatic import of bookmarks from IE or Firefox - lame.
RSS is built in - which is nice, but it doesn’t give me an option to subscribe in an external RSS reader as Firefox does.
No extensions, no adblock, nothing compelling here at all.
Doesn’t use the extra buttons on my IntelliMouse to back and forward - a feature I use a million times a day.
What is supposed to be compelling about this browser? It browses the web - but that’s about it. There is nothing special to it. I don’t even find it especially fast.
Why did Apple release this today? Is it that there is simply nothing else to report? Normally, this would have been a silent release. During the keynote, Jobs took a lot of jabs at Microsoft, which I think is a bad sign. If they had had real news, it would have spoken for itself, with no need for poking this much fun at MS.
Oh well, the iPhone is sill going to be released on the 29th - but there was no news about it today, except for the rather lame fact that developers will be able to program web applications for it. And that’s that.
Safari is getting uninstalled as I am writing this.
Update: Mark Robinson likes it, so does Michael D Jensen of SoleSEO (highlighting the RSS functionality). Simon Dickson isn’t very excited:
I’ve yet to discover anything I’d consider (a) innovative and (b) worth having. I’ll keep it installed, but probably only for testing purposes.
The AppleGazette isn’t very excited either:
Well…and again, I’ve only played with it for a few minutes, but it’s really kinda slow. The only Windows machine I have access to is a few years old, so it’s not a lighting fast beast, but Firefox 2 has no problems loading on it with lighting efficiency, so I have to wonder about those 1.6 times faster claims against Firefox in the Keynote…
Technorati tags: apple, safari, vista, steve jobs
Yeah, well, at first I thought it was kind of neat to have it on Windows but honestly I pretty much just use Firefox on a daily basis.