Where's the Cork?

posted on february 25, 2003, tag: software

Yesterday I posted an entry about Safari's new tab feature as well as a screenshot of said tabs. I took that screenshot of the leaked build of Safari I got from some random web link after taking a few minutes to scour through some common OS X weblogs and sites. I thought I had done something spectacular—as if I were one of the few non-NDA-beta-testers to have this build of the program—and prided myself on having found something kept so secret and protected.

In reality, links to this build of Safari are everywhere—What Do I Know, Spymac, even David Hyatt's weblog for chrissakes—and Apple has done nothing to stop any of it. You would think at least Hyatt would delete the links to the leaked build in his comments.

This says two things to me: one, Apple wants the publicity of this build. They like the idea of everyone wanting this so badly that people are willing to break an NDA and release it, or two, Apple is do damned oblivious they don't know it's happening. I can't believe the latter, though—it doesn't seem possible they could miss all of this. I'm leaning more toward the publicity point. I think this is doing nothing but good things for Safari.

It's one thing to have a public beta, it's another to not mind when the public beta internal betas are leaked, but at which point do they just finally open up completely and start offering nightly builds. And, would this be a bad thing?

Granted, if Apple allowed anyone and everyone to download nightly builds of Safari, there would be problems for people who don't understand that the process includes bug reporting and troubleshooting and crashing, etcetera. But if Apple opened up their beta test program to the web/software development crowd, and offered nightly builds and a better bug reporting system (see Mozilla's Bugzilla), don't you think Safari would progress faster and become an overall better product?