Walt-O-Matic

A co-worker showed me an interesting problem with Firefox today. He loaded a page from our application (running on localhost) and the page content loaded instantly, but the page load itself didn’t end until a time out 20 seconds later. Literally.

Everything we saw a measured from the browser or from the sending application showed that the content was sent in milliseconds, and the page load was just sitting there doing nothing. We were even using the latest Firefox beta.

Other browsers had no such problem.

Turns out, we figured out what was going on using the Tamper Data add-on.

Turns out there was a Connection: keep-alive in the header. When we changed it from keep-alive to close, the browser behaved as expected. That is, it loaded the page instantly.

A little web investigation showed that when you use the keep-alive attribute, you must also use Content-Length: header, which the sending application wasn’t doing.

A quick application tweak to send the content length, and everything ran super spiffy.

Now, if you don’t have access to the application that’s sending you web pages, you can twiddle with the about:config and change the network.http.keep-alive setting to false.

According to WebWare, Apple is releasing its browser, Safari, for the Windows platform.

The initial question from the community is: Why? (Though this may be the wrong question..!)

Clearly the region of the browser application space has been filled by Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and a handful of others.

Wouldn’t releasing Safari simply make the Windows environment more compelling to stay? This got me thinking…

What if multi-platform Safari wasn’t the point at all, but it was actually a proof of concept of something greater?

A while back, Apple made the stunning announcement that it had been secretly working on a way to take the same source code and produce a PowerPC version and a Intel (Mac) version, and have them look identical. Combined together, they make the Universal Binary, which is a program that can be run on either system architecture. This was no small feat of clever engineering.

What if the Top Secret feature is that they’ve added Windows as a target for the same source code? Already RealBASIC is doing it, but that’s BASIC, not the mixed language richness of XCode.

As a developer, if I can use Apple’s amazing environment to produce Windows code, I’m all for it.

As a business owner, if I can produce applications and have them work on Apple’s customers as well, I’m all for the additional marketspace.

And, …if I’m a home user… if I’m wanting to switch to Mac, but I’m tied to the Windows platform because of application lock-in, this is a breath of freedom if my applications and data work elsewhere.

Could it be that Apple has taken Safari and simply “recompiled” it? That this is merely the test run to give applications independence of Windows, allowing users to switch over to a kinder, friendlier environment?

I’d like to think so.