Questionable Rumor Claims Safari and iTunes to Merge Into Single Application

[MCIowaRulz]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

No I do not want to download 300 MB updates if this happens

 

[Cougarcat]

If you start a headline as "questionable rumor," it doesn't belong on Page 1.

 

[HLdan]

Safari is utter crap.

iTunes isn't much better.

I'm not sure how crap + crap would equal not crap.

I certainly don't think Safari is utter crap. I'm suspecting you're a PC user that's tried Safari and just hates it. On the Mac it's an excellent browser and it's inline with the UI. iTunes is great app, but yes it's sadly bloated and slow. Apple needs to work on iTunes badly, but I don't agree either with integrating the browser and media player.

 

[jwhite878]

I don't get it. I mean, I know this probably isn't true, but it just doesn't work. How does a media player in a browser propel the browser to the top of the market? Just no.

 

[Brendon Bauer]

Safari feels snappier...




oh wait, no. Definitely a lot less snappy snow

 

[^^ CoolMacLover]

I dont understand how it would work? What above the address bar we have the itunes controls? On the side we'd have the music stuff? xD
I attempted at my own make up but couldnt.

 

[HLdan]

Ugh.


No one on windows cares about Safari ( apart from testing web sites ) - it doesn't look and behave like a windows app.

This might be exactly why Apple would integrate Safari into iTunes.

 

[cocky jeremy]

I certainly don't think Safari is utter crap. I'm suspecting you're a PC user that's tried Safari and just hates it. On the Mac it's an excellent browser and it's inline with the UI. iTunes is great app, but yes it's sadly bloated and slow. Apple needs to work on iTunes badly, but I don't agree either with integrating the browser and media player.

Agreed. Safari for Mac is EASILY my favorite browser, and believe me, i've used them all. Lets make a quick list.

Safari, Firefox, Camino, Chrome, Opera, RockMelt, Flock 3.

If i had to make a list, i'd do this order:

Safari
RockMelt
Firefox
Camino
Opera
Flock 3
Chrome

I do NOT understand the lovefest with Chrome on here. For me, it's very slow and i hate the UI. But as you said, iTunes is a bit bloated.

 

[ecapdeville]

(Once again, I'm NOT in favor of it, but the legal issues seem imaginary.)

Something like Microsoft selling Windows with Internet Explorer included... some kind of monopoly stuff...

 

[Mr. Gates]

Sure it could. iTunes 9.x was a lot slower than iTunes 10.x is.

I get your point though.

You mean faster....

Right?

 

[jared_kipe]

Both programs are already bloated and they want to merge them? Looks like I'm staying with Chrome.

Exactly. I don't have enough RAM for that.

Seriously, one time my computer was acting all sorts of weird and caused me to relaunch finder. Well finder wouldn't relaunch so I had to reboot.
When it came back up I checked the logs. Safari got an out of memory error trying to allocate like 3gb of RAM or something, so I suspect Finder was acting weird because Safari ate all the ram and it was paging out like crazy to eat more.

 

[blackpond]

A perfect match! The two worst Apple "apps" merged into one!

Seriously,though.

Hey, Apple, if you want to be the dominant browser, build a better browser. End of story.

 

[kalsta]

Why all the Safari bashing?

A terrible idea. But I don't get a lot of the comments either, or why it's turned into such a Safari bashing.

As a web developer, I can tell you that doing standards-based development for Safari (any Webkit browser really, and that includes Chrome) is an absolute joy. I'm cheering for any such browser that takes market share away from IE, because if IE were dead I wouldn't have to keep supporting it! I use Safari as my personal browser too, and it does the job well. Can people explain to me why they think it's such a bad browser? I'm very curious to know where people are coming from with this.

iTunes is not such a terrible program either. (Although I hear it has more problems on Windows, and this needs to be addressed!) But I do agree, some of it's functions could be split into a separate program. If it were up to me, I might have one program for managing all media content on your Mac or PC — music, videos, and books — and another for managing Apple's portable devices and their apps. Unfortunately that's not likely to happen because it would mean that people now need two apps when they purchase an iDevice, and that would be more confusing for many consumers. So people need to get used to it. iTunes is not getting split into separate apps any time soon.

 

[Mr. Gates]

A perfect match! The two worst Apple "apps" merged into one!

Seriously,though.

Hey, Apple, if you want to be the dominant browser, build a better browser. End of story.

So True !

Cheaters Never win !

Glad this is only a BS Rumor, but hey, That's why we are all here !

 

[kalsta]

While Google is trying to bring desktop apps into the browser, Apple is trying to bring browser content to the desktop via web-enabled apps. They actually seem to want to get RID of the browser by delivering all cloud services via native iOS/Mac OS apps.

Yes and no. Yes, Apple's seems to prefer native apps over web apps. That is a far cry from saying they want to get rid of the browser. There are some tasks that cry out for separate apps, but sometimes you just want to sit down and 'browse the web'. Apple is not stupid. They know users want/need a dedicated web browsing experience.

In this context, it is not hard to believe that Apple would merge Safari with iTunes and make this application run ONLY on their platform. Everyone agrees that Apple will soon introduce a streaming, cloud-based version of iTunes. We also know that Apple is working on some "revolutionary" HTML features for Lion OS. The move of bringing iTunes into the browser (or the browser into iTunes) is a logical next step.

You can do both, without integrating them into a single app. iTunes already is web-enabled for what it needs to do (as others have already pointed out). And having a standards-compliant iTunes web app, just means that you can use it even if you're stuck using someone else's computer. It's really that simple.

 

[DrFreeman]

Not a bad idea

Actually this may be a good idea.

• Put Radio into Safari, maybe not a big move but anything to reduce the 90MB
• Place the music player in Safari, the Cover Flow is already there.
• Allow a degree of browser syncing for music, something that Firefox is now doing with tabs/history/bookmarks in beta4 as standard but with no access to music library.

Now tell me why this is a bad idea. Spotify has a light program that does all that. You can easily put it into a browser. Apple can and I think it should.

I think everyone is assuming that Apple is going to put the whole iTunes into Safari, which I think is unfounded. There are certain functionalities that you should never mix with a browser, and I do not think Apple will.

 

[cgc]

Actually this may be a good idea.

• Put Radio into Safari, maybe not a big move but anything to reduce the 90MB
• Place the music player in Safari, the Cover Flow is already there.
• Allow browser syncing for music, something that Firefox is now doing with tabs/history/bookmarks in beta4 as standard, but with no access to music library

Now tell me why this is a bad idea. Spotify has a light program that does all that. You can easily put it into a browser. Apple can and I think it should.

I think everyone is assuming that Apple is going to put the whole iTunes into Safari, which I think is unfounded. There are certain functionalities that you should never mix with a browser, and I do not think Apple will.

I don't see any reason Apple should do anything you say unless they release an extension that allows some of the above-mentioned functionality...no need to make iTunes or Safari into a multi-tool with knife, screwdriver, binoculars, shoe horn, dog whistle, martini glass, etc. Make an app that is good at doing a task, no need to make it crappy at everything.

 

[DrFreeman]

I don't see any reason Apple should do anything you say unless they release an extension that allows some of the above-mentioned functionality...no need to make iTunes or Safari into a multi-tool with knife, screwdriver, binoculars, shoe horn, dog whistle, martini glass, etc. Make an app that is good at doing a task, no need to make it crappy at everything.

I think the idea would be to use iTunes as an app to communicate between devices and Safari as a consuming tool for them. I think there may be a distinction here. So you do not need to run a program that is an overkill just for listening to the music.

Also it might be easier to implement computer syncing for music this way.

 

[Steve Ballmer]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

When Macrumors uses the term 'highly skeptical' you'd be wise to pay attention.

I wouldn't get too upset about this just yet.

EDIT: But yes, terrible if true. iTunes needs to be split up, if anything.

Couldn't agree more. iTunes really should called "iMedia" for all the things it does.

What they should do is just have iTunes for music ONLY, another program to manage my photos, videos and the million other things iTunes does, and then another program just for Ping.

 

[catmistake]

iTunes already IS a web browser

Likely this is one of those things that got twisted in the grapevine. Safari, as a fully dedicated web browser is not going away. Chances are it is iTunes that is due for a major overhaul, namely, updating it's internal engine to be at web-feature parity with Safari. They probably aren't merging into one... just that the advances in Safari's webkit internals will be applied to iTunes', replacing whatever gawdawful junk is in there now. And there will be much rejoicing... iTunes is a slug.

 

[inlovewithi]

The main reason why I got an android phone is because it didn't require me to install software, like itunes or the zune one.

 

[doctor-don]

Exactly. I don't have enough RAM for that.

Seriously, one time my computer was acting all sorts of weird and caused me to relaunch finder. Well finder wouldn't relaunch so I had to reboot.
When it came back up I checked the logs. Safari got an out of memory error trying to allocate like 3gb of RAM or something, so I suspect Finder was acting weird because Safari ate all the ram and it was paging out like crazy to eat more.

When I have had Safari freeze, I used Activity Monitor to check on why it was hung. The memory being used would fluctuate - up to 600,000,000,000 GB.

Now THAT is weird!

A terrible idea. But I don't get a lot of the comments either, or why it's turned into such a Safari bashing.

As a web developer, I can tell you that doing standards-based development for Safari (any Webkit browser really, and that includes Chrome) is an absolute joy. I'm cheering for any such browser that takes market share away from IE, because if IE were dead I wouldn't have to keep supporting it! I use Safari as my personal browser too, and it does the job well. Can people explain to me why they think it's such a bad browser? I'm very curious to know where people are coming from with this.

iTunes is not such a terrible program either. (Although I hear it has more problems on Windows, and this needs to be addressed!) But I do agree, some of it's functions could be split into a separate program. If it were up to me, I might have one program for managing all media content on your Mac or PC — music, videos, and books — and another for managing Apple's portable devices and their apps. Unfortunately that's not likely to happen because it would mean that people now need two apps when they purchase an iDevice, and that would be more confusing for many consumers. So people need to get used to it. iTunes is not getting split into separate apps any time soon.

Safari-bashing is due to the PCers commenting on an Apple / Mac forum. They just don't want to admit that Macs have a following of those who prefer files aligning on the right instead of the left of the desktop as well as the window tools on the top left.

iTunes + Safari is a Questionable Rumor that deserves to be on page 2 ... or page 3.

 

[ortuno2k]

Better not be.
I stopped using Safari and switched to Chrome, but haven't found a music manager as comparable as iTunes which works on both Macs & PCs.
But I'd dump iTunes in a heartbeat if this were to happen... go back to WMP or Winamp...

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

But that's like Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer merging.

They did do it but since Microsoft still has both on their latest Windows version we can see how well that was liked I'd guess...

Whatever...

I see the 'App Store' doing away, made part of iTunes...

 

[Cougarcat]

Likely this is one of those things that got twisted in the grapevine. Safari, as a fully dedicated web browser is not going away. Chances are it is iTunes that is due for a major overhaul, namely, updating it's internal engine to be at web-feature parity with Safari. They probably aren't merging into one... just that the advances in Safari's webkit internals will be applied to iTunes', replacing whatever gawdawful junk is in there now. And there will be much rejoicing... iTunes is a slug.

iTunes is a slug, bud not due to Webkit. It already uses Safari 5's webkit for the Store and iTunes LP. There's a reason when you install Safari it makes you restart, Webkit is used in a lot of things.