At today’s World Wide Developer Conference, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the availability of a public beta version of Safari 3 for both the Macintosh and Windows. Apple’s goal is to increase Safari’s already-respectable market share, probably to induce more Windows users to switch to the Macintosh.
Importantly, Safari 3 successfully runs Zillow.com’s main web site, as well as the MarketLinx/Tempo MLS system. These were two of the more notable sites that failed to work properly with past versions of Safari. The inability to run the MLS system in Safari had stymied our own plans at BloodhoundRealty.com to completely jettison Windows and the kludgey hardware it runs on.
This is our house on Zillow.com. The Zestimate is off by $123,397 or so, but the site is running flawlessly in Safari, where it has never run before.
There’s more. Last week, Jobs said that the operating system on the iPhone will be a full version of Mac OS X. Today at the WWDC, he said that the iPhone will be running a full version of Safari.
The implication? As I discussed when the iPhone was introduced, with MLS access, this will be the best Realtor phone ever.
Guess what? This is looking like the best Realtor phone ever…
I’ve found all kinds of cool upgrades in the Safari 3 beta just in the course of writing this post. Download it and play with it yourself. Not only did your Windows machine just drop off the edge of the universe, your laptop, whether Windows or Mac, may have gone with it.
Further notice: Richard Riccelli points out that pre-release software always entails a risk. If you can’t get yourself out of trouble, better not to get in. On the other hand, Saft has been updated to work with the beta. And while the Windows wizards have been trying to knock Safari down, over 1,000,000 people have downloaded the WinSafarai beta.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing, Zillow.com
Loren Nason says:
I still disagree that it will be the best realtor phone ever. But only at first. Even though i windows hardcore to the bone i’m tempted to a macbook and the iPhone is really nice looking.
The problems I see though is battery life. More specifically for the power user who keeps a spare battery. You can’t keep a spare with the iPhone since the battery can’t be changed.
But, this phone can grow with later generations into one freakinly awesome device
June 11, 2007 — 10:12 pm
Robbie says:
Great, another browser to test. Most of the Windows folks who’ve played with Safari are sticking with Firefox. (Why Apple picked KHTML over Gecko I’ll never understand). Apple develops a lot of great stuff, but Windows applications are not their strong suit.
Still, I wish them well trying to increase their market share. If they can get bug for bug compatability between Mac, iPhone & Windows Safari, a whole lot of web developers will finally be able to test their apps on Safari without having to purchase fruit computers.
June 12, 2007 — 12:26 am
Shaun McLane says:
Text rendering is beautiful in Safari. I use a Mac at home, but carry an XP laptop on the road. I hate IE, so seeing Safari is a dream come true. There were a few problems with the Safari beta on Mac, but the Windows version is performing strong. Now if we could get our local MLS to work on it, we’d have a hands-down winner. I’m anxious to see if the public will accept this as they have iTunes, making our jobs as developers MUCH easier.
June 12, 2007 — 4:39 am
Greg Swann says:
The Windows blogs are hopping this morning, trying to rain on Safari’s parade. Someone found a memory leak and reported it as a DoS vulnerability. My favorite was a blog complaining that Safari’s font rendering is bad because the fonts look like… wait for it… the actual fonts and not Windows stick figures.
Robbie, I don’t know what was changed with this version, but it seems to be much more kludge-compliant with MSIE. Redfin.com still doesn’t work, as an example, but that could simply be because it is not making it past a browser-check look-up. Zillow.com’s browser-check tolerates Safari 3 (I asked), which is how I was able to test it yesterday. So, Shaun, your MLS provider may simply have to permit Safari 3 in the door and the rest of the problems may be solved.
Not all is heaven, though. Saft, a Swiss-Army-Knife Safari plug-in, doesn’t work with the beta yet. I can’t get it to open a PDF into a tab, not too Cocoalicious. I successfully crashed the beta twice yesterday. Safari itself, not my Mac. My iMac has never crashed. I’d like to repeat those words for Windows users who just don’t get it: I use a lot of very memory-intensive, hardware-intensive software. I routinely work on files (signage, movies) that are 500 megabytes and larger. My iMac has never crashed.
On the other hand, the Mac version of Safari 3 comes with a host of new webkit tools, so the upgrade to the beta version introduced little improvements all over the operating system. The Safari 3 beta feels like a nice slice of Leopard in itself.
June 12, 2007 — 7:07 am
David G from Zillow.com says:
We’re delighted that this Beta is released. Zillow was tested and enabled on the webkit version of this update – we’ve been waiting for safari to release an upgrade. Finally mac users can stop harassing me; they’re a passionate bunch 😉
Personally, I can’t wait for the iphone – it feels like the night before Christmas – I’m going to be in line when the store opens on the 29th. If I had Blackberry stock I’d be dumping it.
June 12, 2007 — 8:12 am
B.R. says:
new 2.0 buzzword – Cocoalicious 😉
Thanks for talking about this, Greg. Honestly, I’m still trying to figure out why I would or would not want to make the investment in the iphone. I own all generations of the treo and having seen where it’s gone (or has fallen short), it’s great to see Apple take this project back on. Please keep the feedback coming.
iphone concerns:
memory
battery
excessive programs fragging my phone
This is one gigantic tip of the iceberg…
June 12, 2007 — 8:14 am
Greg Swann says:
David: > I’m going to be in line when the store opens on the 29th
For all my enthusiasm, we’re not early adopters of mission-critical tools. We’ll probably wait three months or more to see how things shake out.
Actually… We’re running Safari 3 on my Mac but not the others. Maybe I could talk Cathy into letting me get an iPhone for testing, while I still work from my Treo 650. What’s even creepier than a Bluetooth headset? Two Bluetooth headsets, one for each ear…
B.R.: > I’m still trying to figure out why I would or would not want to make the investment in the iphone.
It may take two or three iterations to get there, but this phone has the potential to be a real estate office in your pocket. Synced with desktop machine, you could have everything you’ve always wanted but never got from your laptop.
June 12, 2007 — 9:29 am
Erion Shehaj says:
It’s about time the MLS/Tempo system worked on something else other than Internet Explorer. At this time I used Firefox for everything but MLS and it is quite frustrating.
As far as the iPhone is concerned, I will admit that it is a very sexy looking product and it has a lot of “did you see that” features. However, I still can’t get over the fact that this phone doesn’t have a keyboard. As someone who can write a whole page email on the Blackberry under five minutes flat, I still have a hard time picturing how you write stuff on this machine. I have seen the commercials and the touch screen keyboard may be alright for typing “calamari” but I don’t know how effective it could be in writing an email outright.
June 12, 2007 — 10:42 am