Call to action: Deceptive marketing of Safari 4 | Hacker News Reader

Call to action: Deceptive marketing of Safari 4

my.opera.com

50 pointsteej45 comments

Apple always had an arrogant marketing. It’s part of their DNA. Especially when they merely catch up with their competitors they claim to be the first, the fastest and the best.

This make sometimes difficult to understand when they truly innovate.

(The Powermac G4 at 400Mhz was supposed to be a “super computer”)

Anyways as long as Webkit is gaining users, it will also benefit to Firefox and Opera (and vice-versa).

The magic of Apple, of course, is that on many occasions they catch up, but they integrate their features so neatly that using their product you do feel like they've done something for the very first time. I've found myself getting thrilled about features Apple adds that I've had on other systems for a while, because they very often get them just right in ways that other operating systems and companies don't.

Dashboard and Spaces, for instance, both excited me a lot when I first got to use them, and in Space's case when they first got announced. I'd been using Ubuntu at the time, and I had both widgets and multiple desktops, but it was different. With the Apple system, it feels right visually and in effect. The way widgets spin around when you use them, the small thing like the clock turning into a calendar when you click it, in Dashboard. With Spaces, the way your windows visually flew around, and the way you could zoom out and see the little cubbies.

I'll get flack for saying it, but it just happened with Safari 4 and tabs. For the first time, they make sense where they are. I run Safari with minimal chrome, and now the tabs ARE the window bar. And that makes sense! These tabs are effectively multiple windows stacked into a single space. It suddenly fits perfectly how they're displayed. Safari 4 has problems with the specifics of how the tabs go, but for the first time it makes sense where they appear visually.

That's why I love Apple's marketing: because it's so excitingly arrogant. No matter what they've got, they talk about it like it's magic and new, and I love that in commercials. No people going "Oh! This is so exciting to me!". They just take it for granted that you'd better like what they're talking about. It's more fun to see commercials like that. (I adore the iPhone app ads, with the "Things have changed forever" slogan, for that particular reason.)

I agree, but howerver spaces is the one exception, it's totally useless compared to a really working virtual desktop like gnome, kde, or even better wmii. I could never get over the fact that spaces magically throws you around between desktops when klicking on program icons, and is totally opinionated on on which spaces to start program windows.

It uses a different philosophy than the other space managers. It's all about trying to emulate physical space. I like that a lot: I don't use enough windows in a day for it to be necessary, but that's the philosophical concept that makes the most sense to me.

I read the article. Most of the claims are not outrageous. In one place, Apple marketing says "the first popular browser to support..." which, in marketing terms, is meant to rule out Opera. So the claim is technically accurate, slightly misleading, but nothing out of the ordinary for marketing.

Where I think the article is misguided, is that you don't fight marketing with engineering. I mean you can try, but then your only receptive audience are computer geeks.

Of the general population using Safari, IE, and so on, how many care about the exact date, time and seconds when a feature was announced or released by Opera? That's my point. I'm a big fan of being perfectly accurate, but I'm smart enough to know that it's not enough to win in the real world.

Which goes back to one of my favorite topics: if only open source had decent marketing...

Seems like an issue of business ethics. It is internally inconsistent to endorse a company because they claim to have green products and green policies, but at the same time are known to throw hyperboles left and right. "But it's standard marketing..." is applying conveniently different strictness to different statements from the same company.

The hypocrisy runs deep, everywhere, but many customers are either unaware of it, or pretend it doesn't exist. Marketing is marketing, but it is very dangerous when many people have broken BS filters, and worse, willfully so. I for one appreciate this kind of obsessive nitpicking when available.

The entire problem here, and the one you point out about OSS, rests on education :-) More educators please!

I'm going to go out on a limb and disagree with you entirely. Marketing is not about displaying facts. I'd love it to be about being brutally honest with your product, but if that's how it was then there would be no need for marketing. Instead, marketing is about conveying what you want to convey quickly and without crap. Apple's point is, "Here are our new things. They're really cool." Anything outside of that you've got to implicitly understand is there just for spectacle, and in Apple's case I forgive them entirely, because they're so good at making commercials and ads.

Know what kind of marketing I hate? The sort where you put smiling faces all over and add peripheral features and say "We're a community of happy people," or "We give you an experience", or that use things like ridiculous swooshes and gradients to look nice. Know who does that? Opera Opera Opera. They show smiling users, and their site's all about swooshes and gradients.

And it pisses me off more that Opera is so arrogant about being the first, because guess who they're blatantly stealing from? Apple! Their front page's Latest News aesthetic is ripped directly from Apple's front page. Their layout for browser features on their browser page? That's new: it used to be columns until Apple started their "3-column new features" method of advertising. Their "three snappy words for a product" is taken from Apple. Their font is Myriad Pro, for fuck's sake. Only they don't rip right from Apple, because Apple's schtick is "We show you our product and make that product beautiful enough to market itself", and Opera can't do that. (Maybe now that Hicks is on Opera's team, they can start - I'd love that, since I prefer Opera and their marketing to the browser and marketing of Mozilla - remember that "promotes openness" checkbox on the Firefox vs. Safari page? I do.)

As I said in another comment, at least Apple is honest about their marketing. Their marketing is very blatantly so, and they keep it a point to maintain some integrity: all they talk about are their features. Opera doesn't do that. Most companies don't. As a result, Apple's ads come across every time as refreshing and new, and they don't try to convince you with features that aren't really there. I'm fine with that.

I'm not sure where you disagreed with me entirely. My point is that I am in support of this kind of very nitpicky writeup. This is in response to "you don't fight marketing with engineering." I am saying you fight it with whatever. Just get different perspectives out there.

I don't know if Opera is arrogant. Maybe they are -- and it's good that you pointed it out. The smiling users bit applies to Apple as well though. It's really not about Opera vs. Apple. It's about knowing that information is veiled, and how to look past that veil, like parsing political speech.

I consider myself a "nerd" but am also exception to ahoyhere's generalization (I also don't think it is a good one, because it is basically describing a psychological defense mechanism, which I doubt is the crux of it). I simply have an obsession with the educational aspect of this.

To be cynical, all marketing is untrue. If it was true then they wouldn't have to tell you otherwise.

Try listening to advertising and considering how plausible the _exact opposite_ of what they say is. You'll be surprised.

Not untrue so much as inconsequential. Dave Barry wrote about this pretty famously: if Coke and Pepsi advertise how much better they taste, it's because they taste the same. If a shampoo company markets its special herb, that herb means nothing.

Apple's one of those rare companies that doesn't necessarily do that, because very often they've got something worth getting. I love their commercials where it's just a song and their product lying there, like the Macbook Air and the iMac commercials, because those are the ads where they don't have much to say, so they focus on the sheer beauty of their products. When they do have something big, the ads are incredible. I still love watching the old iPod ads. Incredible clips.

unalone, you're very much correct but there's a nerd skepticism about anything related to "marketing" because nerd populations typically are comprised of people who have a hard time with social soft skills and marketing is the ultimate soft-skill trade.

Nerds, like every other group, denigrate what they lack/have difficulty with, thus the bleating for naked facts... in direct contrast to how human beings work, of course, but c'est la vie.

I actually wrote an article comparing the browser landing pages for Vitamin, based on a talk I did at OSCON (about UX in general). You might find it interesting: http://thinkvitamin.com/features/product-pages-so-much-suck-...

Opera by far had the worst, and even their new improved one was ineffective (altho better than before).

Their current one really rips everything off Apple and Firefox's old design, but they can't even be bothered to do it right.

BTW, fact-seekers, does Opera actually Make You Faster? It is really Safer Internet? Is it true that Opera is Internet browser innovation?

Just checking.

That was a terrific rip-apart! Definitely made my morning.

I'm always curious about how much being a nerd makes people antisocial, versus how much being antisocial makes them nerds.

My first thought as well as soon as I saw 'popular'. That's really all it takes to rule Opera out of consideration. I really doubt many outside of a tech environment have ever even heard of Opera. I still am surprised at those unaware of Firefox.

And something they need to learn, even if you have a superior product, a business requires superior marketing to succeed. Relying on anti-trust lawsuits and 'call to actions' are not really going to advance them to where they want to be. In this case, they come off appearing weak (and starting a wikipedia entry on it, oh please, talk about where factual claims are not going to be represented).

Opera,

How about you stop whining about how Apple advertises and just produce a superior product?

I don't think that's fair.

First, it doesn't look like this was an official Opera team complaint. I can't even tell for sure if the guy that started the thread works for Opera.

Second, right now each and every one of the web browsers available has some very stupid problems: Firefox 3 still uses silly amounts of memory, and can't even correctly scroll Reddit pages with lots of comments; Safari is only lukewarm, not customizable, has its own compliance quirks (some versions have a JS bug which will crash it), and isn't especially remarkable in terms of performance; and then there's Internet Explorer.

Opera at least is making an effort, and with fewer resources at hand than either Mozilla or Apple. I'm playing around with 10 alpha right now, and it can actually play TED videos on my PB G4 without skipping frames! Hooray!

With Opera's Dragonfly developer tool, about the only thing that keeps me going back to Firefox right now is AdBlock Plus. If only there were an auto-updating set-it-and-forget equivalent, I'd kick Firefox to the curb for not ironing out some of their issues before releasing 3.

I don't work for Opera or any browser company. I am merely an Opera user. The problem is that the marketing is dishonest. Generally people take offense to that alone but in addition, they are shedding negatively light on other browsers (chrome, opera, firefox, even ie) that have had the features and functionality they are claiming to have pioneered.

I haven't looked through Opera's page very much, but Firefox certainly does the same in reverse. They've fixed up their claims - before they were even worse - but they still claim a lot of pseudofeature crap that doesn't matter, while admitting that function-wise, Safari's at least on par with them. (When it first came out the marketing talk was much worse: it reminded me in the worst way of things that palm readers say.)

Somebody downvoted you, which was stupid (guys, quit downvoting people you agree with if they're making good points, we're pretending to be civilized here), but I couldn't help but notice that while you've got criticism for Firefox, your things about Safari are things like "lukewarm", which isn't saying much, and "not customizable", which is false (Safari has some incredible plug-ins, and there're a handful of really good ones that people blatantly ignore because they don't advertise their existence). "Isn't especially remarkable" can be said about both Safari and Opera, who are pretty similar to me as an end user. The only impressive one is possibly Chrome, because of its multithreading.

Also, if you're a Mac user, I would recommend GlimmerBlocker (http://glimmerblocker.org), which works as an adblocker for every browser you have, which is awesome.

Thanks! I didn't know about Safari's plugins, and I didn't have specific criticisms of it -- other than the crashing bug with drove me nuts at one point -- because I haven't worked with it as much as I have Firefox. Usually it just hangs out in the background somewhere running Pandora and occasionally being a testbed for a site. (However, it just took forever to shut down...)

GlimmerBlocker looks great, I'm trying it out now.

Probably a harsher tone than you needed to take but I do agree. It often seems like Opera's marketing strategy is to scream "me too!" every time one of the more popular browsers does something.

Bottom line: Even though they're right about Apple being a little misleading the sour grapes/call to arms strategy makes me less inclined to try Opera not more.

If they really felt the need to do something they should have taken it with good humor and then turned it into a marketing pitch by extolling their products virtues.

Take a look at Opera's history[1]. Screaming "me too" is like Internet Explorer (and Safari) adding tabs and touting it as a feature. There is no "me too" in first. And either way, users are NOT working for Opera ASA. You think Apple's OFFICIAL false claims are just fine and a few Opera users who don't like these false claims make you want to try Opera less?

[1] http://www.opera.com/docs/history/

My goal was not to draw in Opera users with the post. My goal was to bring the truth to light.

Maybe Apple just don't think Opera matters. I mean, that does seem to be the general opinion.

Opera has been a superior product for YEARS !

However, Apple has had superior MARKETING for years (and I admire them for that :-)

I feel bad for Opera that all the great innovations haven't been noticed by the public, but the good thing is that all the other browsers copy their innovations and get much better.

My killer browsing tip (which maybe the other browsers support as well - I don't know):

- tabs to the left instead of on top

I can have 50 tabs open on my 22 monitor (in portrait mode), and I can still read most of the titles (it shows "Hacker News | Add com..." for this tab while having 50 tabs open)

OMNIWeb for OS X supports vertical display of tabs as well. They do it in a 'drawer', in the OS X interface parlance. I love this feature but eventually moved on from OMNIWeb as it got passed in stability, capability, elegance, speed, etc. by other browsers.

Hey sweet, thanks for mentioning that. I didn't know they could go there ... it's much better now.

If Microsoft claimed that IE was the first browser to offer tabbed browsing, a dedicated search field, etc. - would your reaction be the same?

And how is Opera inferior to Safari? Opera's market share is lower than Safari's, of course, since it's not bundled with any operating system, but that does not mean it's inferior.

I've got a soft spot for Opera, but while they're getting whipped at Javascript speed and the UI is, er, characterful, I'm not sure I care who came first with Auto-Click.

Also, I don't know if the guys in thread noticed that drlaunch's "rebuttals" all mostly support Apple's claims. Does he not know that Webkit was extracted out of, and in certain contexts is wholly synoymous with, Safari?

Meh, some of these are true... especially Acid 3. (Depends on whether you consider safari == webkit and if you count Chrome.)

Afaik, Opera still hasn't released a public version of their browser that passes Acid 3 fully (including speed). Although I know Opera 10 does.

That whole situation with ACID 3 is very unclear to me. That 'smooth animation' requirement makes thing so complected. For example I can run Safari 4 beta on a very slow machine and technically it won;t pass the test. Or I could find a very fast computer and run Opera 10 alpha to pass it. So...

I would just list a chain of events. But I will say explicitly about browsers & rendering engines and scoring 100/100 & 'fully pass'

Last spring:

1. Opera announced that they have scored 100/100 on some internal build.

2. They released a build on labs.opera.com

3. WebKit team found an error in one of the tests and it was changed. Opera's build score went down to 99/100

4. WebKit released a public build

During the summer:

5. WebKit released the first build to 'fully pass' the test (100/100 + smooth animation).

Last December:

6. Opera released 10 alpha - technically it is the first publicly available preview release of the Browser to score 100/100 (as opposed to a rendering engine)

This February:

7. Apple released Safari 4 beta - technically it is the first publicly available preview release of the Browser to fully pass ACID 3 (100/100 + smooth animation)

As I see both companies can advertise their achievement:

Opera 10 alpha - the first browser to score 100/100 on ACID 3

Safari 4 beta - the first browser to fully pass ACID 3

The thing is that both claims are True! :)

But that doesn't mean that other Apple or Opera claims are legitimate. As for browser popularity it depends from country to country especially in Opera case. There are even countries where Opera is the most popular browser.

> There are even countries where Opera is the most popular browser.

I'm having a hard time believing this. Any stats?

> For example I can run Safari 4 beta on a very slow machine and technically it won;t pass the test.

Hixie, who's pretty much the guy behind the whole test-suite and the authority on Acid 3, said that the reference machine is MacBook Pro. So, no, you couldn't run it on a slow machine and say it doesn't pass, because that's not the machine it has to pass on. :)

> I'm having a hard time believing this. Any stats?

Belarus (or Byelorussia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarus Stats: http://www.liveinternet.ru/stat/ru/browsers.html?slice=by;pe...

Ukraine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine Stats: http://www.liveinternet.ru/stat/ru/browsers.html?slice=ukr;p...

Opera is more popular than Firefox in Russia http://www.liveinternet.ru/stat/ru/browsers.html?slice=ru;pe...

It's interesting that Russian Google users prefer Firefox, though http://www.liveinternet.ru/stat/ru/browsers.html?slice=Googl...

As a bottom line: worldwide market share doesn't mean anything. Even if you don't support some browser with a 0.1% share then you stop supporting millions of people and leave them upset.

But you shouldn't think about smaller browsers. Pick a good tools like jQuery (which replaced all browser sniffing code with feature detection) and provide a fallback (like GMail basic or Y!Mail Classic) and you should be fine :)

And don't leave IE 8 f*cked up: never use 'if IE' conditional comments. Check for a specific versions instead like 'if lte IE 7'. Give them a chance.

> the reference machine is MacBook Pro

Didn't know that, sorry. As I said I seems just too complicated to me :)

Chrome passes fully (100/100 and speed) and came out before Safari 4. This would make them at the least 2nd place and definitely not the only.

But Chrome uses WebKit and Apple contributors were the ones who got WebKit to pass Acid 3 first and released a proper build long before Chrome came around. :) So, again, as mentioned before, depends on your criteria. As somebody said, this is usual Apple — agreesive marketing, but some of these are true or partially true, so it's not as bad as that forum post makes it seem.

Speaking of Safari, it really annoys me that the Apple software updater always wants to "update" my Safari install (even thou Safari is not installed.)

Am I the only one who finds this incredibly irritating?

I find that annoying as well but 99% of OSX users probably keep it installed so its probably not a top priority at Apple.

Yeah, but probably 1% of Windows Quicktime and Windows iTunes users do.

Apple is a pain in the ass if you don't play by their rules. Using Quicktime on Windows is painful, and iTunes isn't much better. It's their one major falling-out as a company, though I can forgive them as long as I'm not using Windows at the moment.

I'm a bit confused: what form of "action," exactly, would Opera like us to take here?

That sounded snarky and sarcastic, but I'm really not sure what a public debunking of ad copy is supposed to do? Rockports don't actually "make me feel like walking," there are quite a few "other white meats" besides pork, and Apple is advertising their own products.

What, exactly, is supposed to happen next here?

The action is to document the lies that Apple is spreading.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fearphage/sandbox/Deceptiv...

Depends if you allow safari==webkit.

Why would you allow the rendering engine to be used interchangeably with the browser?

Even if you allow for this bending of the facts, it would mean CHROME was first in a lot of things (Acid3 for instance) and not Safari. They are both based on the webkit engine.

Because WebKit releases nightlies titled "WebKit.app" that people can download and run as a standalone app.

Call to action? They are overreacting to some commonly used marketing techniques.

The fastest computer ever. The safest web browser ever. The greenest car ever.

We've heard it before, we'll hear it again in the future.

It's better to take it in the spirit of challenge rather than waste god knows how many man-hours tirelessly documenting "The Great Feature Train Robbery" or whatever somebody titled the Digg submission.

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