Earlier this week, Jobs announced the release of a version of the Safari browser for Windows. Safari has been available only for the Mac since its release and Jobs chose to tout the release of the Windows version as the beginning of some kind of new browser war.
What irritates me about Apple is that though it is a proprietary software company, it is elevated to some kind of divine status. It's difficult to comprehend.
Take the release of the Safari beta on June 12. Of course, one expects bugs in beta software but Apple was still arrogant enough to boast on its site that one of the reasons "why you'll love Safari" is its security.
Expanding on the theme, the website boasts, "Safari was designed to be secure from day one." Sure. And I was born to be Miss World as well.
Jobs was careful not to make any claims about security when announcing the release - he only claimed that the browser would run much faster than Internet Explorer. To anyone who's played around a bit with browsers, that's like saying running is faster than walking. I have yet to use a browser - and I have experimented with lots of them - which is slower than the kludge which masquerades as the default browser on Windows.
It appears that I wasn't the only person irritated by these claims about security; some hackers did a bit of investigation and found that there were more than half a dozen bugs in the Safari beta, including some which could ensure that your beautiful Mac could be 0wned.
I'm currently engaged in testing Windows Vista (of which you, dear reader, will hear much more next week) so I was able to have a look at Safari. There is some funny behaviour - but I have no complaint about that. It's what you expect in beta software.
Some other things do annoy me, though. Why does Apple supply links to specific companies within the browser - links to eBay, Amazon, Yahoo! and various organisations that claim to provide news? Are there commercial deals behind this? How about a bit of disclosure?
Seriously, if CNN, the New York Times, Google News, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the BBC, National Public Radio, and CNET are all that are proffered as "news" sources, then there are serious credibility issues involved. Of course, if these are paid arrangements, then why not disclose them?
And if we do need to have the mandatory link to Apple, then how about an additional link to the page that provides news about security fixes? Judging by what was discovered during the first few days after the release, there's going to be a lot of code coming down the software update tube pretty soon. Or would Apple prefer that we just see beauty and not the beast?
I also find Safari annoying in that it makes it quite difficult to block the mass of flash animations and ads that seem to dominate the web these days. A user-defined style sheet would not work. Ah, but making it easy to block ads - as Firefix, that gift to the web user, does - would not play well with the corporate world, now would it?
But the issues with Safari are just symptomatic of ways in which Apple seeks to pretend that it is in some way different from other proprietary software companies.
When it comes to security vulnerabilities, Apple is as bad as Microsoft in divulging details. Fixes are quietly released. Until then the general practice is to deny that X, Y or Z is "actually" a security problem.
When it comes to reacting to leaks, Apple is even more draconian than Microsoft. I don't have to go to into details here - the cases of Apple Insider and Think Secret are well known.
Lest the Apple faithful leap to conclusions, let me state here that Apple does produce excellent software that is much better than that which comes out of Redmond. I find OS X many streets ahead of some other operating systems.
Many people refer to Microsoft as the devil. All that I'd like to remind people of is the fact that Apple is no angel.
