So Safari is available on Windows. Whoop-de-doo, eh? While I'm not exactly sold on the "Safari is the best browser out there on any platform" sales schtick I can understand why Apple have chosen to do it. The most obvious reason is because, as has been confirmed, it allows Windows based web developers to test in Safari without having to have a special Macintosh somewhere in the office.

This situation has been around for a while; very few web developers would develop natively on a Mac because, quite simply, the most prominent browser by a good 60% of the browser market doesn't run on it. However, thanks to the rather half-baked nonsense that was Internet Explorer for Mac, and the even more platform specific issue of Safari, the Mac has been something of a second class citizen in the web design world. Indeed, there is a very good reason most Mac users I know use Camino or Firefox; the Gecko engine. Stuff developed on Linux or Windows will work just the same, and that's got to be good.

So far, so obvious. Apple want the iPhone to be a success, so they need non-Mac based web developers (most of them) to be able to target Safari natively. Good. Well, at the very least it should push some web designers away from the 'basically IE with firefox tweaks' or 'basically Firefox with IE tweaks' methods they've been using, Opera support notwithstanding. Standards being what they are (completely non-standard, even in this day and age) it'll be nice to get a fairly unified web that works on pretty much whatever.

Unfortunately, one thing I did pick up on, and as has been very well explained by John Lilly of Mozilla, is that Apple seem to think that it's somehow 1998, and that the web is crying out for a two-browser duoploy. For some even more inexplicable reason, they seem to want the duopoly to consist of Safari and Internet Explorer, soaking up the "Firefox, Opera and Other" market share into one glorious hole. *ahem* whole.

There are numerous theories that I could come up with for why they want this. Maybe they're fed up of all these open source upstarts on the Mac taking Safari's market share? Maybe they think that competition with a known monopolist like Microsoft is somehow healthy? Maybe they're just completely insane? Out of the three, the last one seems to make most sense.

So here we are. We have Yet Another Browser on the Windows scene, and a Linux port is surely not far behind, and we have a bunch of nutters at Apple who want the late 90s and early 00s to be replayed in all their horror. The simple fact, though, is that the internet is most certainly not crying out for another closed source browser war. It's certainly not crying out for the proprietisation of the internet. In fact, what the Internet as a whole is crying out for is more openness please.