On Feb 3, 2004, at 8:49 PM, Justin French wrote:
The problem is, Safari 1.0 doesn't actually expire (AFAIK).
Correct. 1.0 is the last version produced for OS X 10.2.x (Jaguar). 1.2 is the current version for OS X 10.3.x (Panther).
Whilst it's more than likely that a vast majority of web users will upgrade to 10.3 this year, there will still be a massive number on 10.2.x, and developers are either forced to:
I don't know that "a vast majority of web users will upgrade to 10.3", this year or otherwise. My laptop is provided by work and work upgraded me to 10.3 (thank you!) and now Software Update keeps my Safari install up to the latest version (optional - I could have stayed with 1.1). My wife's machine is paid for out of our own pocket and she's on 10.2, albeit the latest 10.2.x, therefore she uses Safari 1.0 (and loves it). However, I don't think she'd get the extra value out of Panther to make it worthwhile upgrading her to 10.3.
a) stay with 10.2.x thinking that they're safer testing on the older (more bugs) version
b) upgrade to 10.3.x, take the update of Safari, and ignore Safari 1.0 users
You can't even rely on 10.3.x folks being on 1.2 - yes, it's likely but it isn't a given.
Safari 1.2 should be available to 10.2 users via the software update.
Not possible, it relies on stuff in Panther as far as I can tell.
Safari 1.0 & 1.1 should be available as multiple installs for any Mac OS X user.
Since the core rendering engine etc is shared core code, I suspect it would be tricky to support multiple versions of Safari. Which is the same situation really as IE on Win.
All browsers should have an expiry date, auto-update, and a nag-screen for any browser that has expired.
That would be fabulous, yes.
What would be even better is if Safari (and Mozilla, etc) had multiple rendering engines that could be selected from a list (Safari 1, 1.1, 1.2) so that developers could easily switch between all three form within one app.
Yes, that would also be fabulous. Mozilla however does allow multiple version installs (I had four different versions installed at one point) although you can only run one at a time. Given the relative market shares of the various browsers, the real killer is still that you cannot have multiple versions of IE installed at any one time. Mozilla is the second most widely deployed and it *does* allow multiple versions. Safari is some way behind (although it may well be fast approaching the majority browser on Mac?). So in the grand scale of things, IE is still a developer's bugaboo...
Sean A Corfield -- http://www.corfield.org/blog/
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
-- George Bernard Shaw
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