Apple has announced that they are releasing a version of the Safari web browser for Windows. Apple say that Safari for Windows is twice as fast as Internet Explorer (is that saying much?) and that a beta release is available for XP and Vista.

It will be interesting to see if the Windows and Mac versions render the same (unlike MS IE on Windows and Mac). Also interesting is the fact that Safari’s rendering engine is in part based on KHTML the Linux/*nix GUI, which will hopefully help raise the status of Open Source code even more.

Many people (myself included) were not terribly impressed with the layout of Windows Itunes, hopefully Safari will be a more intuitive experience. If we (as web developers) are really lucky, Safari will end up with 25% market share (who knows, perhaps the Iphone will drive that since it comes with Safari.) and the rest is divided between Firefox, IE and Opera. That way it will be impossible for any one browser to drive developers away from W3C standards ever again.

See Apple/Safari for more details.

I’ll be the first to admit I’m not on the podcasting bandwagon. I don’t own an ipod or anything like one. I probably won’t anytime soon either (see my beef with Apple). But the whole emphasis by Apple on protecting the name podcast presents me no issue at all. There are several suggestions on how to rename the concept (instead of the protected thing), and even some suggesting that people nominate a successor term to be used. I’m like Scoble on this one, videocast, audiocast and perhaps mediacast for both audio and video (ironically if you go to mediacast.com you find that they are called netcasts, webcasts and cybercasts …). Then we can add fantasycast (or is that already taken?) for when we add in aroma and other senses like misting etc. (you laugh, some are actually working on such concepts). Anyway, they are all descriptive, in fact more descriptive than podcast anyway.

I wish I had a xyle scope! I was reading today how Mike over at MikeIndustries.com spiffied up a myspace page. He used his “xyle scope” that allowed him to look under the hood. Now I have parts of this functionality thanks to my Web Developer extension in Firefox, but it appeared as though this might just be slicker. Unfortunately I swore off any hope of a Mac after they mistreated me a few months ago with my daughter’s new but not working right i-Pod. To think that I had to use up my free consultation … without them asking me if I wanted to … to fix a problem that the item shipped with. Jerks!

One of my family members decided to buy an iPod video. It was partially a gift, so it was opened more than fourteen days after it arrived. I called today to say it wasn’t working properly and ask if it was possible to return it. I got disconnected after waiting about ten minutes. No person answered and spoke with me.

I called back — I wait another ten minutes. The first person told me the answer was no, you can only return it within fourteen days. Swell. The battery shows dead immediately after you charge it and you cannot turn it off. Seems like a defective product to me. They say sorry the best we can do is have you talk to tech support. They transfer me and I wait again. Eventually the guy picks up and laughs (after taking the time to get my name and so forth which takes a couple of minutes) because he is in the computer division. He has to transfer me again. I wait longer this time and eventually some lady I can understand, but only if I listen really carefully to talks me through a powerdown and reset. She says that should clear the battery problem and the problem with it turning off is that I don’t know how to use the thing. In fact I don’t know how to use the thing, but the family member who bought it does, and they tell me that it sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t — which is also what I told the lady.

After all of this, she sends me two email links with a “no-reply” address. And now, after the call is over, she tells me oh by the way, this was your one free support call and if you need us again it is $49 per call or $59 for two years. This is a new defective product — the hardware may not be bad, but the software definately had a glitch or she wouldn’t have been so concerned to check the version of updates before having me reset the machine it seems. Why should I pay anything for that. I called to ask about returning the thing. And if it was my one free call, perhaps they should have told me before, not after the call.

Let’s just cut to the chase: the Apple product I never bought — and I was just thinking I might actually like one of those things — is the last Apple product I plan to buy anytime soon. Good-Bye Apple.

I like the support of many other companies (Best Buy Customer Care excluded, they suck too). I should probably not depart without giving kudos to some good companies. I always buy LinkSys products because the support is so solid. I have Earthlink high speed because the support is so solid. It is time for people to support people with support.

Continuing to lose market share of MAC browser users, Microsoft is throwing in the Internet Explorer towel. Do it now, if you use a MAC, dump IE. It has not had an update of consequence in three years anyway as explained here on C-Net.

Today Opera release an upgrade to the Windows and Linux version of it’s Version 8 Opera browser, labelled as 8.01. At the same time they released version 8 Opera browser for the Macintosh operating system. We don’t mind the Opera Browser to be honest, but find Firefox superior for our purposes for two reasons: (1) Firefox is free and Open Source versus Opera that is proprietary and either a purchased or advertisement supported and (2) we love the Firefox extension system. However, we certainly prefer Opera to Internet Explorer because of much tighter security and better W3C standards compliance. Some sites make a big deal that this is a security upgrade being quietly released. Frankly, all browser upgrades now include some security enhancements and unfortunately if they say that is a major cause of the release, people try to trumpet how they had flaws. Darned if they do and darned if they don’t. Recent and regular updates are the key — and of course they include security enhancements if it is a decent company.

In other browser news, AOL has released an update for Netscape 8 which fixes an IE XML problem and several bugs. You can download the free updated browser here. Microsoft also released a patch to IE in their last patch Tuesday which you should already have if you use XP, but if not you can get it via Windows Update.

According to the Apple Blog at News.com, the Queen of England now has her very own I-Pod. This makes me chuckle because of a recent ipod giveaway over at Mike Industries that had people juxtapose ipods into historical events. It was pretty comical, but now, it may be a case where he preceeded reality as well. Instead of the Queen just nodding off in boredom, you may suddenly realize she is not paying attention when her foot starts tapping on the floor.