Dr Kronos and his ramblings

The article states

HP is buying Palm because it wants the company’s operating system to use in Web-connected printers, Chairman and CEO Mark Hurd said during HP’s quarterly earnings call. The printers let people print maps, theater tickets and other content straight from the Internet, without needing to start a PC.

“You’ve now got a whole series of Web-connected printers that, as they connect to the Web, need an OS. We prefer that OS to be our [intellectual property], where we can control the customer experience,” Hurd said when asked about HP’s motives for the $1.2 billion deal to buy Palm.

“You can certainly make the same case for smaller form-factor products in the mobile world, like a slate,” he added.

HP does want to grow Palm’s smartphone business, Hurd said, but that’s not its only motivation for buying the company, and possibly not even the biggest.

If this is even remotely true, then I take it back, HP are the stupidest printer manufacturers out there.

I should have posted this update weeks ago to my entry titled “Does Apple even know that Safari is useless ?“. I was told about glims, a Safari extension which brings session management and a tab undo feature. Whilst glims includes a number of other features, these are two of my original issues with Safari. The session management works wonderfully. Whilst the undo tab feature seems a bit hidden, it does exactly what it says. Safari now seems more useful and potentially able to replace my day to day Firefox usage.

I do however want to see what the next version of Safari brings with it. Also, will that new version break glims ?

TechCrunch is reporting a rumour that HP may well have dropped it’s Windows 7 slate” tablet PC. In the article TechCrunch stated the opinion (or at least worded it that way)

HP may also be abandoning Intel-based hardware for its slate lineup simply because it’s too power hungry.

They then go on to mention the possibility of an Android based tablet or even a WebOS based tablet. I will go one further and say that this is exactly what we will see, a HP Slate based on WebOS. WebOS is liked by it’s users and HP will own the entire footprint once the sale goes through (at $1.2 billion I really doubt somebody else is going to make a better offer and I think the Palm share holders know this).

With very little effort this will put HP in the same situation as Apple, a power efficient tablet with a well tested OS and good integration of it’s product.

However, HP’s track record in developing a winning hardware/software combinations outside of printers is almost nil. If I were HP, I would look at what Nokia did with Symbian and steer well clear of that approach. A good OS means nothing if it is left to rot. Even Microsoft have conceded that with the Mobile 7 refresh.

Enough said

Yes, I know Apple took a quite good HTML widget (KDE’s khtml) and turned it into a first class HTML engine, the open source Webkit. And yes, it’s fast, very standards compliant and looks gorgeous. What I’m not sure about is if Apple realise that’s only the first step in building a browser users want to use.

When you start Safari, you get a lovely looking very minimal interface. Unfortunately minimal also seems to mean missing pretty much most of the features I need.

• No session management. When the severely brain damaged excuse for a browser known as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer can even support session management, even if in a barely useable and utterly crippled half arsed approach, then it’s time to question just what exactly we need to do to get Apple to support session management. And let’s not forget, this is a company that can code most of it’s applications to remember where their last windows were positioned, so remembering the last tabs and windows that were open is a simple task. I bet a couple of days is all it would take a Safari developer to create this.
• Speaking of remembering tabs and windows, how about an undo close button. Really, it’s almost 2010 and Safari users don’t get to have an undo button ???? And before you say it, yes I do occasionally close the wrong tab that I want to reopen without having to go to the history menu. And so do you so stop moaning.
• The missing tab preference “open new windows as new tab”. It really bugs me that when I click on a Digg link it opens a new window. I know, I can just press the command button, but I don’t have to do that in Firefox, why do I have to do that in Safari ?
• No Ad block. Before you jump on the whole “sites deserve the their ad revenue” bandwagon, let me say two things. Firstly, lots of sites go out of their way to ruin my whole browsing experience by putting the most obnoxious and annoying adverts all over the page, or in so many cases, making me have to wade through pages that do nothing but load an advert before I get to the content. Secondly, any half way decent ad blocker can let you see the adverts on sites you really feel deserve the advertising revenue (I leave Ads on most of my indie tech sites I visit, but then those sites usually go for unobtrusive advertising anyway).
• Following on from the Ad blocker issue, extensions. What ? Don’t think people want extensions for Safari, then check out pimpmysafari.com. People want extensions, and there are extensions, but go read the hoops the extension developers have to go through to not only get their extension to work in Safari, but to get it to keep working when Safari gets a patch or even a new major release.

Maybe this just isn’t something a software company can do. After all, these are all features you get with every open-source driven web browser out there, but other than Opera (which I just can’t abide, sorry Opera users but I just can’t) no vendor created browser seems to implement these features (or not well anyway, yes, I’m looking at you IE, hang your head in shame).

But as a major proponent of all things Apple, I’m disappointed to see Apple think that doing the same as other vendors is OK. Unfortunately I don’t even know if Apple believes these are real issues. Apple may be happy with how Safari is. After all, Safari is probably fine for the average user. But if there is anything my gut tells me, it’s that the power users are the ones you have to convince to help you gain market share. And we’re not happy with Safari the way it is.

And shame on me, I forgot about the cool, original and snazzy show top sites button Apple developed.

That’s because I don’t use it. Good one Apple.