Mac Users and Cross Platform Apps

About a month ago I blogged about my feel­ings on Mac browsers in Mac Browsers and Non-​Native UI. My basic feel­ing was that the best browser that’s made for a Mac always wins. Fire­fox is a great browser, but it’s not made for a Mac.

A recent arti­cle on Theo­ca­cao has basi­cally rein­forced what I said in my pre­vi­ous post. It’s well worth the read.

Stevenson’s main rule of thumb for Mac development:

Mac users will gen­er­ally favor an app with a better expe­ri­ence over the one with more features.

Make sure to read that twice. He’s absolutely right.

Get­ting back to the browsers, Steven­son uses Fire­fox as an exam­ple for the above point:

A text­book exam­ple of this is Fire­fox. A great browser, but Safari is far more pop­u­lar on the Mac because it’s designed for a Mac user. In fact, this runs so deeply that Camino — a Mac-​only app which uses the same Gecko engine that Fire­fox does — enjoys a fairly strong following.

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