It's fun watching Dave Hyatt's pseudo-open thought processes on Surfin' Safari. Specifically, he's had a couple of posts recently pondering the directions he thinks Safari should move in. The specific two are: Rise of the Uber-Browser and Uber-Browser Take #2: Sherfari. Between them they ponder hi takes on adding some of the functionality of NetNewsWire and/or Sherlock to Safari. The idea is that there's two directions to move in:

• One is that their functionality can be usurped by Safari, and a basic web interface would be all that remains of these apps.
• The other is that these applications use the frameworks that Safaris makes available so that they can more easily embed HTML inside them selves, and continue to exists as separate apps.

I think both of those are the wrong approach.

In Hyatt's second post, he references an article by Jason Kottke asking "Why are Safari and Sherlock two different applications?" Although Hyatt disagrees, I think this is definitely the direction to move in.

I'm lazy. I don't mind having lots of windows open, but I hate having to launch lots of applications. I don't like having to muck with putting them in my login items, seeing them in the dock, hunting them down in my applications folder, or whatever is appropriate. When I think if some specific functionality I like, I like to have it where I tend to already be. I also think that more people write applications the more functionality they don't have to write, that's why Cocoa is popular.

From the user's perspective: Odds are good that if an application has need for an HTML renderer, it's embedding links to other sites somewhere. I don't like having to jump back and forth between applications every time I decide to visit a site. This is the main reason I keep getting irritated by NetNewsWire. I don't like having to jump to Safari and then back. What would be cool, for me, is if there was some sort of drawer that I could slide out of a browser window that had the NNW list-`o-sites in it. the RSS feeds would display in the main Safari browser window, and if they had links in them, they would stay in that window. Brent wouldn't have to worry about implementing printing of those sites or of the feeds, Safari would take care of that, and if I start browsing "normally" after a while, NNW is still there. By opening the drawer in my (probably) already open Safari, I'm opening NNW, and not having to switch to the finder, and then switch to NNW just to read a post then then switches me back to Safari...that's the kind of thing that hurts my brain.

From the application author's perspective: If I want to write a web services type app, I'm probably going to have to do more than just throw around some XML-RPC an display some HTML once in a while. It would be nice if I could just sit inside some other app that would take care of any other silly stuff I didn't feel like writing. If I want to print a weblog post I'm reading in NNW, or print some movie information from Sherlock, they don't need to worry about implementing printing, Safari has done that. Hell, in NNW, if it wanted to instead print the underlying web page instead of thee RSS feed, that'd be a nifty option too.

Overall, one of the coolest things Safari could do, would be to really work on making an extensible interface that makes it easy for other software provider to either add functionality, embed applications, or even potentially replace functionality. This would enable all sorts of nifty utilities, and far outweigh the complaints of folks like Opera.