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This Weekend’s Bitchmeme: Safari

Posted by Frederic On March - 21 - 2008

<rant>

I’m no Apple fanboi, but the whole bruhaha over Apple pushing Safari onto unwitting Windows users is just your typical Friday afternoon bitchmeme.

Lets face it - Apple gives you a chance to opt out of installing Safari - it isn’t silently installing it without asking for your consent.

The people who are unwittingly installing this probably have installed a million blinking spyware Christmas trees, Yahoo! and Google toolbars and God knows what else. Safari is probably the least of their worries.

And what’s the worst thing that is going to happen if somebody does not check the box? He/she is going to use 26mb of a hard-drive to install a browser that is functional but bland.

Big f-ing deal.

It’s not spyware - at least I don’t think it phones home your credit-card numbers to Steve Jobs.

And if it gets some people to switch away from the horror that are the version of Internet Explorer before version 7, then that’s a very good thing.

So - time to relax, have a glass of wine, relax and wait for next Fridays installment of the bitchmeme meme.

</rant>

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3 Comments

  1. corvida says:

    lol YOU RIGHT! They’re definitely making it seem like Safari is spyware, when it’s one of the best browsers out there. It’s just an unexpected move from Apple & one you would associate moreso with Microsoft.

  2. rizzn says:

    Yeah, I’m going to disagree. That sort of bundling annoys the absolute crap out of me, the same way that iTunes tries to jam the horrible excuse for a codec called QuickTime down my throat every five minutes when they come out with a new iTunes version.

    And frankly, I think Apple is great and all, but even Google is in the spyware business these days (though the politically correct term for it these days is behavioral marketing, I think), so I can’t make the blanket statement that I’d trust Apple not to be spying on my browsing habits.

  3. Frederic says:

    @rizzn - I don’t disagree that it is annoying, but it is not the horror that it is made out to be by some. That said - behavioral marketing is simply evil and annoys the hell out of me, too, but I don’t believe Apple would risk the backlash…

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About Me

My name is Frederic. I am a PhD student and have been writing about technology on this blog for about the last three years. The focus of this blog is on Web 2.0, blogging, social media, and news aggregation.

These days, you can find most of my professional writing on ReadWriteWeb.

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