Web standards exist for a reason

Back at the end of the browser wars — i.e. the late 20th century — it looked like Microsoft had won and Netscape had lost. A number of Windows-centric shops designed their websites for Internet Explorer, either in terms of full functionality (“works best with Internet Explorer") or actual access (“requires Internet Explorer”). Microsoft encouraged this by promulgating APIs for Visual Basic, .Net and DirectX and the like.

Fast forward to today. Over the past five years, Microsoft’s desktop market share has been in a freefall. Statcounter — the widely cited arbiter of browser usage — chronicles how Google Chrome has come from nowhere to take share from IE and (to a lesser degree) Firefox (heir to Netscape’s customers and developers). At 55% in January 2010, the IE share is now under 22%:

When you include all platforms — tablets, mobile phones and consoles — the news for Microsoft is even worse — with an IE share of 13.5%:

Yes, as a Mac owner this was particularly galling, since Microsoft had a Mac version of IE (as one MS employee pointed out to me) only as long as it served its purposes during the browser wars. MS discontinued IE for OS X in 2003. Fortunately, with IE now a small fraction of the web audience, it no longer matters — except at one site crucial for business professors, as I discovered today working on a paper.

The Virtue of Bad Design
One of the more popular proprietary business databases is called Thomson One, from Thomson Corporation (later Thomson Reuters). For entrepreneurship scholars (like me), the most relevant content is VentureXpert, a database of investments by VCs, angel networks, corporate VC and other private equity investments. This data is used by PWC and its partners to announce their quarterly VC funding stats at the PWC MoneyTree site.

Unfortunately, Thomson One is only compatible with Internet Explorer. Worse yet, it is not supported (and doesn’t fully work) with any version of IE greater than IE 8 (as documented by IT support desks at Wharton, Harvard, Columbia, and other schools).

Internet Explorer 8 was introduced in 2009 and last updated in February 2011 (almost five years ago), just before IE 9 was released in March 2009. IE 8 is not compatible with Microsoft’s current desktops, laptops, tablets or mobile phones, which require Internet Explorer 10 or 11. StatCounter estimates the November 2014 market share of IE 6+7+8 at 4.03% of the desktop market.

For Windows users, there is an IE Tab plug-in that helps Chrome and Firefox imitate IE, but not all the Thomson One features are available in this emulation mode.

Customers Lose, and (So Far) Thomson Still Wins
So to recap, here is where we are:

• The virtue of the web (particularly HTML 4+) is interoperability between browsers.
• One or more IT architects at Thomson Corp. decided years ago to lock their database to specific features of one browser, rather than support Internet standards.
• Those features are so non-standard that they are not supported by Microsoft browsers released since March 2011.
• The company has done nothing to upgrade their site to support the 96% of the world that uses other browsers.

I'd like to think that whoever made this architecture design error was fired for his (it was most likely a he) mistake, but that would assume a level of IT competence that the legacy team of Thomson Corp has not yet demonstrated. (Meanwhile, other Thomson Reuters sites seem to work with a wider range of IE versions and in some cases even have a mobile client).

One thing that is clear is that Thomson Reuters is pretty confident of their monopoly position in this particular niche: if not, their customers would be defecting in droves, and fixing this broken IT infrastructure would finally become a priority. I’m not holding my breath (on either competence or customer orientation suddenly breaking out).

Georgia on my mind

This week Georgia is on my mind. No, not the state that gave us the Peter Principle peanut farmer, nor the former Soviet republic that found it impossible to rest peacefully next to a belligerent bear. Actually, I mean the serif typeface family commissioned by Microsoft for Internet Explorer. As Wikipedia notes: “Georgia is designed for clarity on a computer monitor even at small sizes, partially effective due to a large x-height.”

What prompted this is the announcement that the LATimes.com switched to Georgia as their main screen font as part of their website redesign unveiled last week. Of its traditional national rivals, both NYTimes.com and WashingtonPost.com also make extensive use of Georgia. In fact, three years ago the International Herald Tribune (the European subsidiary of the NYT) reported on the “Georgia revival” among website designers that included the NYT.

In the print world, the conventional wisdom for decades was that serif fonts are more readable at small sizes than the sans serif fonts. However, in the web world, the old conventional wisdom was that sans serif fonts were more readable, although the recent tide has been tending back toward serif fonts. (Some claim there is no difference).

Still, I recall arguing with a web designer (who, alas, knows less about fonts than I’ve forgotten over the past 25 years) who was sure that Arial was the best way to go. As Will Rogers said decades ago: “It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble, it's what we know that ain't so.”

Mozilla and its frenemies

Following my friend Matt Asay’s tweets (a tentative foray into wasting time with Twitter that I don’t waste with NetNewsWire, LinkedIn or Facebook), he had an interesting tweet on Mozilla.

Longtime steward Mitchell Baker and her (relatively newer) CEO John Lilly were interviewed at the WSJ’s D7 conference Thursday. “All Things D” reporter John Paczkowski (formerly of GMSV) has a brief writeup, which Matt tweeted. (A few video highlights are provided by the WSJ).

I’d recommend the entire summary Paczkowski post, but let me quote the parts related to Mozilla’s coopetition with Google:

How does it feel to be competing with Chrome, Walt asks, noting that Mozilla has long had a relationship with Google. “You’re now where Google’s “don’t-be-evil bulldozer is heading. How does that feel?” Baker says relations between the two companies are still good. They are still cooperating on geolocation, for example. The next version of Firefox will ship with that and it’s a Google service. It doesn’t have to be a Google service, but Google provides it for free and as such, is the obvious source.

Lilly jumps in: As long as we build a good browser, we’re OK. We’re not without assets. “We’re not simply going to shut down because Google is entering our market.” Our point of view is that the browser can do more for you. That’s not really Google’s vision. We think of the browser as a “user agent.”

Lilly says he likes Chrome. “Really?” asks Walt. Lilly says yes. He notes that rival browsers like Chrome and Safari have made Firefox better. A nice change from competing against, IE, apparently.
…
What’s the value proposition for Firefox now that Chrome exists? Questioner has switched to Chrome because it runs Google Apps better (which is the way Google designed it). So why use Firefox? People like the interface, says Lilly. They can modify it. They can skin it, etc. Lots of legitimate reasons.

There aren’t a lot of direct quotes, but I like Baker’s one-liner: “If you were a business picking a space in which to compete, you wouldn’t pick one with Microsoft, Apple and Google.” So true

Yet another mobile browser

On the Mobile Monday mailing list and various website, Skyfire this week advertised to grow their marketing staff.

Skyfire is the Mountain View startup that’s garnered $18m in VC to put yet another browser on cell phones — competing with WebKit (on iPhone, S60 and Windows Mobile) and of course the venerable Opera. Until the job ad, I’d never heard of the mobile browser software company, which is supporting WIndows Mobile and someday Symbian S60.

Skyfire is based on Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine. Its claim to fame is that it (unlike say the iPhone) delivers the full desktop browser experience — complete with Flash, QuickTime, Silverlight, AJAX and other goodies not available on the iPhone and other mobile phones — either because they conflict with platform strategies or because of a lack of horsepower in the mobile device. Providing these also gives full access to YouTube, Hulu and other media sites.

Skyfire not only has lots of features, but is also very fast. Of course, there’s a trick — they render the pages on Skyfire’s server and then push bits down to the device. The server-side tricks mean that you need to subscribe to a (presumably paid) service to get the benefits, providing a revenue stream in an era of commoditizing web browsers. Its pending patent could even protect this unique business model.

The problem is, server-side rendering seems to address a temporary (and closing) window of opportunity. As Clay Christensen observed, technology improves faster than customer needs, so low-end solutions display high-end soltuions.

If the Pentium II/Pentium 4 transition is any indication, today’s 300 MHz smartphone will sport a 2 GHz processor in 3-4 years. By then, some will also be multicore, well suited for rendering web content on one processor and doing the remaining computations on another.

Google, the integrated software company

Everyone has been going gaga over Google’s new browser, Chrome. I actually had to work today (teaching classes), so since I’m coming late, let me point to other coverage. The announcement was made in the Google blog, which referenced the Google comic book (officially released on Google books but more readably presented by Blogoscoped).

Om Malik (as is often the case) has an incisive summary of the new software’s features, while Walt Mossberg and the Merc each have a first test drive.

There’s lots of speculation about Chrome being aimed at Firefox rather than Internet Explorer. As of August, market share is 72.2% IE, 19.7% Firefox, 6.4% Safari, and 0.7% Opera and Netscape. (Of the Safari, 0.3% is iPhone, up 58% from July to August). Kara Swisher (of the WSJ-owned site AllThingsD) is skeptical about Google’s chances of winning a browser war:

Google’s in no danger of foundering, given its search business still dominates and quite profitably, of course.

But, for all the halo of that, Google has also never had any other similar true home run with any of the other products it has released so far.

Of course, Chrome is obviously the Android browser, since (as with Android) it’s Google’s browser based on WebKit. Apple already has a browser based on WebKit — it’s called Safari, available for Windows.

While Chrome has more features than Safari, the main difference appears to the new Javascript virtual machine (called V8) from its virtual machine development group in Denmark (replacing SquirrelFish, the most recent WebKit Javascript interpreter). The main difference (according to the comic book) is the multithreaded VM.

Still, why does Google have to go off and make its own browser, given that Apple is already making one? Why not work together? (After all, Google’s CEO is on Apple’s board). Google’s hubris (some would say arrogance) en route to Total World Domination seems to require its go-it-alone strategy, just as with Android it’s calling all the shots and not cooperating with other embedded Linux efforts.

The answer is that this is not about browser wars: this is what strategy professors call “multipoint competition,” in this case over competing hopes for Total World Domination. Microsoft dominated the software industry in the 1990s, and Google is determined to claim that mantle within 5 years.

This means that any software that Microsoft offers Google will eventually offer as well. If it can overcome its hubris, perhaps Google will partner or ally to deliver with other members of the anti-Microsoft camp. I suspect it will always choose weaker partners (like Yahoo or Sun) to keep control rather than strong ones (such as Apple or IBM), at least until that time later this century when it abandons hopes for Total World Domination.

By competing with Microsoft, Google is en route to be a fully integrated software producer, one that happens to deliver more (but not all) of its software as a network service rather than a client-based application. This is a fully integrated stack — from its Android variant of Linux through Chrome to Google-hosted services — rather than the vertical integration of inputs and outputs that characterized 20th century innovation leaders.

Google’s mantra (repeated at the official Chrome intro) is that the browser is not a browser, but a computing platform. This is an update (15 years later) of Sun’s old mantra “the network is the computer.” Unlike with Sun, Google will own both sides of the network used by hundreds of millions (if not billions) of consumers: the client browser, applets that run on the client, and the server stack that delivers those applets and services over the Internet.

Update: It is now clear that Chrome and Android have separate forks of the WebKit open source project, even if someday they may be merged back together.

The ebb and flow of a MySpace-enabled life

Once upon a time I was a college journalist, and later on I worked for a small daily paper. Today, it’s painful to look at some that early work and see how, well, amateurish it was in both its construction and its conception of the world.

Here at SJSU, our student paper is the Spartan Daily and it’s filled with wanna-be journalists who have to crank out several stories a week. (At least at The Tech, we were only twice a week). So, as with any student (or small town) newspaper, the quality is mixed.

But one thing student newspapers have is articles written by students — teens or twentysomethings. So there’s often an authenticity that can’t be captured by hard-boiled professionals in their 30s or 40s. On rare occasions, this authenticity rises above the level of “the state owes me a free education so don’t raise my fees” form of narcissism.

Today I had to sit up and take notice, when I read a great column: “MySpace lives to tell our stories” by Michael Pasaoa, a senior staff writer at the Daily.

The column starts with the premise of dead friends who live on only in MySpace. Some remain listed among the “Top Eight” of their friends, others get birthday cards, and all have a page left behind en memoriam for the world to find. The writing is compelling because it is serious, thoughtful and written from the heart. (In academia, a friend told me of an an analogous case of a faculty member who died at aged 36 but her co-authors got her papers published posthumously).

But then Pasaoa segues into the broader message of the MySpace generation: that if you live your life online, then the traces (both in life and death) will be recorded online:

Our default pictures will change. From high school graduation pictures to college graduation pictures. From wedding pictures to pictures with our first children. MySpace will continue to catalog the parts of our lives that we choose to display to the public.

I'm not sure if we'll grow out of this stage and eventually stop updating, or checking for our friends' updates, but we'll never know when our time's up.

We'll always be remembered online.

For those of us over 25, the message is clear: these social networking sites are more than just a networking tool, just like cellphones are more than a way of making a phone call.

Kid-friendly business models

This morning’s news brought several stories about KidZui, a kid-friendly browser from a San Diego startup. It was written up by Walt Mossberg in the WSJ and my hometown paper talked about how it was formed by an ex-Qualcomm engineer who has won VC funding.

I can’t comment on the product, because it's Windoze-only. However, as one of the target customers I can comment on the business model.

The browser is a piece of software that (AFAIK) seems to have been developed from scratch and not one of the proven open source engines (I can’t tell without the software on my machine or the UserAgent string as a clue). It does appear to provide some additional browser features that make it easier for kids to find information.

The real value is as a service — a whitelist of 500,000 authorized sites, some other filtering controls, and efforts to lock out use of other browsers on the machine. (Mossberg notes that not locking out searches for “Spitzer” could bring up topics you might not want to be seen).

It sounds like a service that would be potentially valuable for our family. Today we use Safari to lock down my daughter’s machine (via a very short whitelist), but that list is a pain to keep current with other legitimate sites. However, we’re too cheap to join KidZui: the price of $5/month or $50/year (discounted from the nominal $10/$100 price) is beyond what we’re willing to spend, when ISP access is only worth about $20-30 a month.

I'm also a little reluctant to go to an entirely new browser. My daughter uses one browser at home and also at school; if she uses a friend’s Windoze machine she’ll come across a third. So having her learn yet another browser is a barrier to adoption.

There are clearly going to be ongoing costs (and value) in maintaining the whitelist. Perhaps the key issue is negotiating site licenses with (notorious poor and cheap) elementary schools to get the brand out there and to seed the market with knowledgeable users.

As for us, our child approaching age 10 may be too old to be a target user. We’re near the end of the “lock our kid out of the Internet” phase and approaching the “use your judgement and talk with us about what you find” phase. But I still wonder who will sign up for the service, absent some clever cross-promotion or co-marketing.

Continuing where Netscape failed

Today is apparently the end of the line for Netscape, with the release of the final version (ever): Netscape 9.0.0.6 for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. As previously announced, AOL is pulling the plug on Netscape support at the end of the month.

The release is mainly a security bug-fix (incorporating Mozilla fixes) on top of the existing Netscape 9 features. It also lists tools for migrating to Mozilla, and something called Flock.

Flock is a social networking browser that is particularly suited for bloggers. It builds on the Mozilla code base but as a separate browser. The software hit 1.0 in November and (now I recall) was being demonstrated during my visit last month to Macworld Expo. The first 1.1 beta was released earlier this week.

However, unlike the open source Mozilla, Flock comes from a for-profit Silicon Valley company co-founded by Bart Decrem, a Mozilla (and Eazel) veteran. Decrem has since left the company and been replaced by an experienced big company manager.

The company has won funding from angels and three VCs (Bessemer, Shasta and Catamount). The only cloud on the horizon that Mozilla has responded with its own social network extensions (subtly named The Coop).

Am I the only who sees an irony here? AOL released Netscape as open source (creating Mozilla) in hopes of helping its browser business, but the effort failed and so it got out of the browser business. Meanwhile, some entrepreneurs come up with an idea for a better browser, but rather than building it from scratch, they leverage the Mozilla code base to create a brand new business.

The triumph of WebKit

I’m sorry to be here in San José instead of Barcelona, because this sounds like a particularly momentous 3GSM conference this year. There’s such a huge amount of news that even from 7,000 miles away it’s impossible to keep up, although the FT coverage (and that of CNET and Engadget Mobile) helps.

Although there’s been a lot of coverage about Google’s gPhone prototypes at MWC, I found an article about Google’s business model to be more interesting.

Google on Wednesday said it had seen 50 times more searches on Apple‘s iPhone than any other mobile handset, adding weight to the group’s confidence at being able to generate significant revenues from the mobile internet.

“We thought it was a mistake and made our engineers check the logs again,” Vic Gundotra, head of Google’s mobile operations told the Financial Times at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

If the trend continues and other handset manufacturers follow Apple’s lead in making web access easy, the number of mobile searches will overtake fixed internet searches “within the next several years”, Mr Gundotra said.

Of course, more searches equals more page views of Google-served ads. Does it mean more click throughs? We assume that, but of course there’s not enough of a track record to tell.

This is a clear validation of Google’s efforts to work with Apple to make the iPhone the premier mobile Internet device. Apple deserves a lot of credit for showing others what to do, and will receive abundant flattery through imitation over the next few years.

What I think it makes clear, however, is the triumph of WebKit — a fast, lean, standards-based open source browser that is rapidly gaining share. It’s Apple’s desktop browser, its iPhone browser, Nokia’s S60 browser, Google’s Android browser, and — as a presentation last month at Mobile Monday made clear, coming soon to Windows Mobile.

The next opportunity is obviously to bring WebKit to the 10% of the smartphone world that uses Blackberries. Strangely, an open source effort to port WebKit to Symbian UIQ seems to be stalled — you would think the Sony Ericsson (or UIQ) bureaucracy could spare an engineer for six months to help along the conversion.

WebKit’s success means that mobile websites will eventually be targeted for WebKit browsers — unless somehow Mozilla can up with clean fast code soon. Since WebKit is open source, Apple may be able to put a unique UI on its iPhone but not a unique web rendering engine.

All browser implementations of HTML etc. standards have their quirks. Today many sites don’t work with Safari’s. However, if you have market share then website operators will have to write their code to be compatible with those quirks.

More importantly for Google, if everyone is running Ajax-compatible WebKit browsers, it can develop cross-platform web apps for the vast majority of the smartphone world while others are still figuring out how to port their native apps.

R.I.P., Netscape

On Friday, AOL announced that it’s pulled the plug on Netscape browser development, and that the browser will be officially unsupported as of Feb. 1. Users are being told to switch to Firefox.

(As a side note, I heard the news during the hourly CBS Radio national news broadcast. How often does a piece of of software make radio news?)

Back in the dot-com era (1999), AOL Time Warner bought Netscape at an inflated price ($9 billion) with its inflated stock as currency. But it was all downhill from there, with layoffs followed by layoffs and plummeting market share. AOL has toyed with reviving Netscape in the past, but Netscape never really recovered from losing the browser wars to Internet Explorer.

Charles Ferguson’s book did a great job chronicling what went wrong inside Netscape, with lousy software engineering and a lack of adult supervision being major contributing factors.

Fortunately, in 1998 AOL released Netscape code as open source (creating Mozilla.org). This marked perhaps the first major corporate-sponsored open source development project. (Sleepycat and MySQL use open source as a distribution strategy but it plays a minor role in the development efforts). In 2003, AOL handed over the keys to Mozilla to an independent foundation, thus assuring the browser a life beyond AOL-Netscape’s failed business model. (To the degree that getting crushed by a free Microsoft browser constitutes failure).

Through the combined efforts of individual open source contributors, charitable/foundation types, and corporate sponsorship (mostly big IT companies like Sun and HP), Mozilla has become a big success, mainly through its flagship Firefox browser. Firefox now has about 15% market share, which is far less Netscape’s near-monopoly, but the only effective competition IE has had in the past 5 years. If the Netscape users switch to Firefox, its share could conceivably pass 30%, which both the Netscape and Mozilla pioneers would consider vindication of the past decade’s efforts.

gPhone becomes Open Vaporware Alliance

Today Google announced the gPhone. What is it? Yet another version of mobile Linux with yet another trade association —— the Open Handset Alliance — which is led by Google, T-Mobile, HTC, Qualcomm and Motorola as the major sponsors (in that order according to the press release).

There are so many levels on which I could dissect the announcement, but I still have to keep my day job, so let me mention only a few:

• Motorola is also a member of the LiMo Foundation, Gnome Mobile and other mobile Linux initiatives, but only some of its allies from these initiatives (Intel, DoCoMo, Samsung) are present here.
• Google CEO Eric Schmidt bragged that this is not a mere phone (take that, Apple) but a platform: "Today's announcement is more ambitious than any single 'Google Phone' that the press has been speculating about over the past few weeks. ... Our vision is that the powerful platform we're unveiling will power thousands of different phone models."
• Now we know why Google paid untold billions in July 2005 for Android Inc., the company at the center of Google's new initiative. Co-founders Andy Rubin (who also founded Danger, OS suppliers to Sidekick) and Rich Miner are firm believers in a post-PC world, as evidenced by Miner's quote in the NYT

  "There is a good chance that the number of potential consumers of Google…may never have a PC. ... So one of our clear goals was to find a way and have a platform (to) deliver Google services, Google content and Google search into those markets, and the mobile phone is going to clearly become much more of a development platform."

• With Qualcomm are its two most bitter US rivals, Broadcom and TI, both of whom would like to destroy its business model.
• The Japanese carriers represented include both Qualcomm-loyalist KDDI and nemesis DoCoMo. Among CDMA carriers in the US, Sprint is aboard but Verizon is notably absent. Of the three major European carriers, T-Mobile is present but Vodafone and Orange are missing. Other GSM carriers including China Mobile and (in Europe) Telefonica and Telecom Italia, but not AT&T, the only major US GSM carrier.

There are some reasons for skepticism:

• In addition to the carriers, absent were the major European and Japanese handset makers. In particular, Nokia and Ericsson are firmly committed to the Symbian platform, and even if Google's Web 2.0-enabled vision becomes a reality, can have the best of web- and native-client applications through their existing smartphone investments.
• The fawning pro-Google euphoria was reminiscent of, well, Apple's iPhone roll-out. Even 10 months ago, Steve Jobs did a demo of his vaporware, and all the OHA had to offer today is a phone call. Plans to ship "second half of 2008" puts them 12-18 months behind the iPhone.
• Instead of the fawning headlines, the term "open" should have been used in quotes (but then the reporters don't study open standards for a living). This is another pay to play trade association, and right now it's not clear how open it is (although almost any Linux group is more open than LiMo).

There are other holes in the story. Android co-founder Rubin said "We've created the platform to be open source," but most of the platform components and layers (as far as we can tell) existed long before Google/Android came along. Rubin also claimed that the phone is the ultimate Internet phone:

Our partners will say that the phone does the Internet, in a way other phones don't do the Internet. We don't have to brand it. When you walk into the store and see a phone with lots of Net applications, vs. others with hardly any, people will get it very quickly.

Of course, the iPhone also does the Internet (pretty well) and most of Apple's major rivals plan their own mobile web strategy. A year is a long time, and it's now certain Nokia will be ready. Motorola and Samsung are both Symbian and LiMo participants, so maybe they hope someone will give them a first-class mobile web experience.

Embedded Linux is doing what it does best, which is fragment like crazy: 2007 has brought more fragmentation and not less. Maybe Gnome Mobile was going nowhere (the website looks a little stale), but the joint effort of Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo seemed promising both from a business and technical standpoint.

Who's ready for the mobile web?

In January, Mike Mace and I both had an intuitive feel that the iPhone was going to change the mobile phone industry. Four months after the first iPhone shipped, I think our intuition has been born out to a greater or lesser degree.

Aided by very satisfied customers and the consequential word of mouth, Apple sold nearly 1.4 million iPhones in the first 94 days. This is AT&T's top selling phone (at 13%) and 4th overall in the US. Of course, Apple is not #4 overall since most vendors sell dozens of models.

In particular, one thing came through loud and clear last week at the CTIA Wireless IT conference (the premier mobile web conference in the US). Admirers and rivals admitted that Apple finally did a mobile browser right, and that accounts for much of its success (an advantage emphasized by their current advertising).

Web browsing solves the fragmentation of the US market, and provides a least common denominator between desktop and cellphone. If all app developers, content providers, cellular operators and mobile phone makers all agreed to use the web -- based on W3C and IETF open standards -- then the mobile Internet couldn't be any more open than that. This openness and ubiquity would eanble all sort of positive network effects to spur adoption, and leverage off the installed base of the wired Internet. Another factor for openness is that Apple's iPhone browser is based on WebKit, the open source project Apple created (from KHTML), which in turn reduces the barriers to imitation for its web browser. (In case web apps aren't enough, this month Apple adddressed the criticism about a "closed" iPhone by announcing it will release formal software development kit for native apps in February.)

If Apple establishes the browser as the key enabler of the mobiler Internet, how well situated are the major handset vendor? Based on Q3 2007 sales estimates, here's the list and my prediction:

• Nokia (38.6%). It ships more smartphones than anyone, owns S60 and the largest share of Symbian Ltd. It has been taking more risks with software than any other cell phone company, including its Maemo web tablet platform. Even if we worried about Nokia falling behind, they are already ready to match Apple by porting WebKit to S60.
• Samsung (14.7%). Has a wide range of software strategies, including Symbian S60, Windows Mobile and its own OS. Historically the Koreans don't grok software, but S60 will have a good browser and Windows Mobile could too (assuming Mobile IE is a fully compatible browser) -- so it may depend on the mix of software platforms they are selling.
• Motorola (12.9%). Like Samsung, Motorola has a mix of platforms: Windows Mobile, Symbian UIQ and its own solution (now shifting towards mobile Linux). Although in principle Linux should have a great browser, Motorola once said that the browser choice was up to the carrier.
• Sony Ericsson (9.0%). SE's smartphone strategy is tied to UIQ -- a Symbian OS layer that it used to own but is now going to share with Motorola. Since UIQ 3.0, UIQ has depended on the Opera browser, which has yet to inspire the enthusiasm of WebKit.

Any others? I think HTC will do well, because it thus far has made its impact with Windows Mobile, but now also has the prospect of the Google phone. On the other hand, while RIM has always understood software and has done well with e-mail, it is not known for its browsers.

Of course, this is a very US-centric view. For Europe, I expect browsers to be important too, but the smartphone market is much less fragmented than the US and much of the market can be reached by writing a native S60 application. Meanwhile, in Japan, the mobile Internet (as Jeff Funk as noted) is whatever DoCoMo says it is.

Does Windows need another browser?

This week is Apple’s annual developer conference. It used to be in San Jose (an easy trip from where I live now) but Steve Jobs prefers The City, so he switched the annual conference from San Jose in April/May to a small corner of Moscone Center in June. The first SF conference (2003) was my last WWDC — I went to most of the WWDC conferences from 1988-2003, and still have many of the old polo shirts.

Today in San Francisco Steve Jobs did his annual WWDC keynote. Tom Krazit of CNET has a good stream of consciousness blog from WWDC. After the expected OS X 10.5 (“Leopard”) demos, the keynote (as reported by Krazit) took an unexpected turn:

11:09--Safari: The Safari Web browser's got about 5 percent market share across the Internet, Jobs says. He'd like to make that number grow. How to make that happen? A version of Safari for Windows.

11:11--Safari 3 runs on Windows XP and Vista, and it exists today. Steve says Safari's HTML performance is twice as fast as IE using a benchmark Ina and I didn't catch. It's also faster than IE on Javascript performance, Jobs says, and it also beats Firefox (although not as much).

11:13--Jobs switches over to a Windows XP window. "This is strange," he jokes. He demonstrates the Windows Safari browsing through various sites, showing off a new tabbing feature. The benchmark we didn't catch is called iBench, and Jobs does a side-by-side comparison of Safari and IE 7 loading a bunch of Web sites. Safari's twice as fast, as you might expect during a WWDC demo. Try it yourself, he says.

11:15--Distribution is the next topic. There are over 500 million downloads of iTunes for Windows out there. Apple's going to have 3 editions of Safari, one that's for Leopard, one for XP, and one for Windows on Tiger. It's a public beta available today on Apple's Web site.

I must say, I didn’t see this one coming: I thought the browser wars were over almost a decade ago. However, in researching her update of IE and Mozilla plans, Mary Jo Foley (ZDNet’s excellent Microsoft blogger) found that Mozilla saw this coming.

Why did they do it? Here are some possible reasons:

• This causes the open source WebKit library for rendering HTML to be more widely used. Webkit is already available on the Nokia/Symbia S60 platform, while Swift is a struggling effort to bring WebKit to Windows. Raising the Safari/WebKit market share would mean more sites would care about Safari/WebKit compatibility. (For those who want to do first-hand research, the WebKit team is having a drinking party tonight in San Francisco.)
• As the TV ads make clear, the iPhone’s success is highly dependent upon Safari and a user experience comparable to a desktop. So maybe building Safari market share and compatibility has now become crucial.
• Windows-only shops can test for Safari compatibility without buying a Mac.
• As Foley suggested, maybe there are some Safari/iTunes integration opportunities.
• Many of Apple’s recent switchers are still running Windows, either at work or at home. So perhaps Apple is trying to give them a clean, consistent user experience rather than have them rely on Firefox (since IE for Mac is gone).

Still, running a Vista shop within Apple just to push Safari seems like a lot of expense; Microsoft has a whole Macintosh division, and they no longer maintain IE. There’s got to be another explanation; perhaps the iTunes for Windows programmers had time on their hands in between updates.

The key note ended a half hour ago. For those who want the new Safari (Mac or Windows), Apple’s download site is now active.

Photo credit: James Martin/CNET News.com

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