Safari a Jaguar in Sheep's Clothing?

Methinks the keynote announcements of iLife and Safari were not unconnected, or at least on the level of subtext. We (meaning the Mac pundit brigade) have talked about an Apple-branded browser for years now, and now that it’s here we are (naturally) distracted by compatibility, standards adherence, bugs, GUI, etc. But let’s step back for a second and look at the larger picture…

I think an Apple-branded browser, in the context of the iLife apps, suggests something bigger. We often talk about the Apple advantage of having the OS and the hardware under one roof; this begs the question, what sort of interaction could they achieve while controlling the web engine — to which could be attached special Apple hooks, providing an even larger experience. Think of the way all of the iLife apps interact with each other now. Now think of .Mac users and what they could do with each other via a web browser. I don’t think Safari is just a web browser.

What might some of those hooks be?

Jason Kottke asks a good question that points at one possibility: Why are Safari and Sherlock two different applications?

Eric Seidel provided a concrete example with mod_rendezvous.

Safari itself opens up FTP sites via the Finder… Hmmm…

Nobody wants to duplicate the Microsoft mistake of making the Finder into a web browser (ewwww), but what if you wanted to upload, say, a blog entry? Go to your homepage and drag a text document onto it.

Drag an icon from a TV program website to iCal and get a reminder when it comes on. Drag that to your Address Book or iChat to let other people know.

They get an icon, which they can drag to their own iCal…or drag to their homepage to post it to their blog. Think Spring on steroids.

Start forming communities websites on .Mac, interconnections between users, with drag and drop functionality. Hmmm…

So what are some other possibilities if we stop thinking of Safari as CyberDog the Sequel? What do you think Apple might have up their sleeves?