Why?
I’m not a huge fan of Yahoo! over Google, but I’m also not a fan of Apple giving Windows users more options when using their software than Mac users. So why is it that Apple allows Windows users testing the Safari 4 beta to choose Yahoo! as their search agent over Google, while Mac users cannot?
Perhaps this option was included so PC users can use a search engine as shoddy and inconsistent as their OS? You know, for consistency?
I think it’s safe to say that the vast majority of Yahoo! users are Windows users.
Also, not only are the vast majority of Mac users likely to be Google users, but there are far fewer Mac Yahoo! users than Windows Yahoo! users.
Essentially, if Apple wants Windows users to use Safari, they will reach out to all of them, not just the ones who use Google.
I agree with Lucas. Yahoo! is still very popular, and probably most often used by Windows users. If Apple wants to get Windows users adopting the Mac platform, they’ll have to ease them into it. If they’re used to using Yahoo!, they’ll want it as an option.
I am still not quite sure why they wouldn’t include it as an option for Mac users though – unless Dr. Eric Schmidt had something to say about it.
I’ll bet Google gives Apple more money per user than Yahoo does. It’s only an option on Windows because otherwise people would bitch about their favourite search engine not being available and then ditch Safari on Windows.
On Mac OS X, there never has really been a choice for which search engine to use (Safari, and Internet Explorer before that).
I wouldn’t worry about that too much.
What do you guess how long it takes for Inquisitor to be updated for Safari 4?
@ mangchutney: yeah.
But with the Google instant search now built-in, what good is Inquisitor besides the visual glitch?
Oh, and.. Inquisitor works only with Yahoo when displaying the relevant sites directly. With Google, it only shows the completed sentences and recent searches.
What I’d really like to see is Safari making it as easy to add custom search providers as Internet Explorer 7 and 8 do.
Even Firefox has a large selection of premade search providers in its addon list, although adding a custom provider yourself for any old site requires some basic knowledge of xml, making Internet Explorer the clear leader in this area.
Opera, though I love it, could certainly make the process a bit easier. If you install Chrome after you set up one of your other browsers to use a custom search provider, it inherits it beautifully but setting up a new one from scratch is still feels like a bit of a hack.