I use a Mac at work. It’s a fine machine and I like the screen and battery life, but I’m not a generally fan of Apple the company or its products. Sometimes I forget why, and I need to be reminded.
Like today, when I decided, even though Safari is basically a sucky product, there are probably people that use it, so I might just port my little political statement Chrome extension to Safari. I’d already done so to Firefox, so how hard could it be?
Well, it turns out, not too hard. Actually, for the minimalist version that most people are using, it required no code changes at all. It did take me awhile to figure out how everything works in the Apple extension tool, but overall, not too bad.
I knew I would have to submit to reviewers at Apple to get it published. I had to do the same at Mozilla for Firefox. But what I did not know is that in order to do that, I had to sign up to be an Apple Developer. Moreover, I could only do so under my real name (ie, not dave@toolsofourtools.org) and most annoying, they wanted $99. A year. or as long as the extension is up.
I’m not going to play $99/yr to provide a free plugin for the few people who are dumb enough to use Safari on a regular basis.
In an odd way, this gets right to the heart of one of the many reasons I do not like Apple. They are constitutionally opposed to my favorite aspects of the computing and the Internet: the highly empowering ability for people to scrappily do, say, make anything they want for next to nothing, and at the level of sophistication that they want to deal with. Apple doesn’t like scrappy things in its world, and actively weeds them out.
Apple, you suck. Thanks for the reminder never to spend my own money on your polished crap.
Absolutely right. And yet…
Yes, on the surface this seems to be the case, but if you’ve ever used a macbook on the go, you will notice that…
…Chrome is an extreme ram and battery hog an therefore only usable if you are using an iMac or have your macbook plugged in constantly.
…Firefox seems to have been designed in the 90s and is everything but intuitive. It also has issues with a lot of websites and eats your battery (not as much as chrome does though)
You see why people use safari now? It’s simple, fast and just works best on Macs. I would consider myself very interested in tech and yet, I use safari as it’s by far the most stable browser I’ve ever used.
Furthermore, calling people ,you don’t even know, dumb, is not right, not even on the Internet, where everybody believes, they can be a Homo Neanderthalensis. You’re not exactly shining a positive light on your blog this way.
Last but not least, you can create a safari extension and just release it for download here, no need for a developer account.
Hi Elias,
Thanks for the comment, it’s nice to hear alternative viewpoints.
I do frequently use my Macbook on the go with Chrome and I have not noticed any particular battery life issues. Unfortunately, I still don’t see why people use Safari, but to each his own. I find Safari particularly clunky and unintuitive.
Regarding your last point about self-hosting Safari extensions, I’m pretty sure you’re wrong. You can host an extension locally, but in order to build and sign it, you need a Safari Extension Certificate, which is something you get when you register as an Apple developer.
to be completely honest, this extension is about 95% of the reason why I’ve switched from safari to chrome ahahaha