Monday at the WWDC Steve Jobs announced that Safari would be ported to Windows. Many people in the audience found this more shocking than the new features offered in the leopard operating system. The reasons behind the port still remain unclear. However technical bloggers everywhere point out that Safari on Windows will act as a Trojan horse, producing a safari halo effect that will draw more Microsoft users to the Macintosh environment.Apple would also like to boost their browser market share. Just last year Firefox made millions of dollars on user Google searches. If you are running Firefox right now, you’ll notice that in the upper right hand corner, there is a search box. Most of us thought that this was out of convenience for the user, but in reality, the Firefox team gets a cut every time a user does a search through their browser. It is no wonder that the default homepage in Firefox is a Google search box.

Firefox is offered across all 3 platforms, what is stopping Safari? There are plenty of Linux users out there that use the Google search box in Firefox, and I believe that apple could make millions of dollars by releasing Safari for Linux.

But wait, does Safari already work for Linux? I installed Ubuntu and the latest version of wine to find out.

The install process works like a charm:

However at the end of the process, it reports errors:

As shown above, Web kit has been ported to the QT environment. Making it easier than ever to create your own web browser in Linux, using the very same foundation that Apple uses for Safari. All of the performance comparisons that they show on their beta page apply not only to Windows / Mac Safari, but to the browsers made from Webkit in Linux as well.

The KDE project is taking advantage of Apple’s open source code, and have already released the unity project. Which is a combination of Webkit and Konqueror (the file / web browser for KDE).

Clearly it’s possible to use Safari’s engine in Linux. Many open source companies have already jumped on that band wagon. Heck, even I programmed my very own webkit based browser. Apple only stands to gain capital by releasing the full fledged Safari for Linux through the use of the Google search bar.

Source :  WWDC Steve Jobs Safari on Linux

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