smackfoo.com | I find your lack of faith disturbing.

I’ve come to a realisation, that was strongly re-enforced recently with the hyperactive launch of Safari for the Microsoft Windows platform.

The realisation isn’t that I particularly prefer Mozilla Firefox itself over say Internet Explorer, or even Opera. It’s not that I even like Firefox, because I don’t.. rather it’s the open source communities input into an absolute myriad of extensions, particularly the likes of greasemonkey, that take what is a rather plan, slightly boring and stupidly resource hungry application and turns it into something entirely different - the browser equivalent of the immortal swiss army knife.

I like Safari. I actually like the concept. It’s not gludgy, has a simple elegance, is not packed with millions of redundant options and it more or less works, albeit with some performance concerns.

It’s beta, so I can forgive some instability. I can forgive the rough edges. I can forgive the tail-spin like sluggish responses on occasion.

I shouldn’t have to live with that in Firefox. But I do. It’s resource requirements can increase at an alarming rate and the regularity with which it can claim massive CPU and memory resources is not forgivable. I’ve tested operation by disabling all plugins and yet it will still happily feast on CPU and memory as though it has just been through famine.

Firefox has hit and passed the version 2.0 milestone and has been in on-going development (with occasional naming fits-and-starts) since November of 2004. It’s been in active development, across a number of platforms for the better part of two point five years.

I’ve been reading all manner of comments about how Firefox is just plain better^tm than Safari - yet what are we comparing here? A product with a two and a half year head start on the windows platform, with an application that didn’t exist (at least officially) on said platform a month ago. Firefox should blow Safari out of the water. It should kick serious booty.

The reality is, Firefox itself is nothing special. It’s what people have built around it, that makes it useable. And with Safari released primarily for web development within windows (even if originally aimed at iPhone development) I wonder what will happen as developers build for Safari.

And that, again, is a difference. Firefox extensions are primarily built to improve access to a resource or perhaps provide additional functionality within the client. That’s resulted in a mish-mash of code that just doesn’t gel as a whole and results in any number of extentions in use, few if any speak to each other and a lot of code ends up duplicated.

That is probably the worst side effect - leading to a bloating product, far from the once web standards compliant light weight browser that would be king.

Yet Safari + iPhone will see the introduction of an environment where the goal is to have a ‘whole’ where the applets and code itself all work in harmonious union. The goal is unified structure - not diverse paths. And that well ‘bleed’ into mainstream use, not just mobile.

Indeed I no longer use Mozilla Thunderbird, as Google Apps provides Gmail for mail management, Google docs for document viewing, Reader for my RSS feeds and Calendar for time management. Why? Because each individual component seamlessly integrates into the whole and I can access it anywhere, any time, be it at home, at work, or on my mobile.

With iPhone and Safari — the same potential exists, any application, any resource, at any time. Web based applications are the future, legacy applications that require all manner of extensions to become functional are not.

So perhaps we should all take note. There is a new hombre in town with a long-term goal, that goal is to build a suite of unified applications around a browser, not just diverse applications and extensions at odds with each other.