Steve Jobs: The Boy Who Cried HTML5

Ever since the Apple vs. Adobe tiff escalated to open letters and snark, the press has been eagerly gobbling this up as fodder to support the horse they’re backing.  I’d say that few have actually stepped back to say that both sides are at least partially to blame.

Apple wouldn’t have any ammo to fire at Adobe, if Adobe itself had actually delivered better mobile Flash technology much sooner.  In the past it dabbled in Flash Lite, which gave some minor functionality, but it’s not until the past couple of months something more robust has been available at all.  That was totally Adobe’s ball to drop, and they’ve done so spectacularly.  If they manage to deliver usable mobile products for platforms other than Apple, which is closed to them at least for the time being, they may have more influence, but that’s going to be some time down the road.

On Apple’s part, they’ve been touting HTML5 as the standard that will handle everything Flash can, without the Adobe overhead.  To a certain extent, they’re right.  The thing is, HTML5 isn’t yet a standard, and it’s still probably going to be cooking for another two years before it’s done.  That hasn’t stopped them from putting up a showcase of HTML5 capabilities.  The only problem is that you can’t view them unless you’re running the Safari browser…

You’ll need to download Safari to view this demo.
This demo was designed with the latest web standards supported by Safari. If you’d like to experience this demo, simply download Safari. It’s free for Mac and PC, and it only takes a few minutes.

There’s no small measure of hypocrisy in Apple’s claim that they’re pushing for the web standards, when they only make these standards visible on their own browser, especially since many (but not all) of these demos can be viewed in other browsers.

To do so, you have to trick Apple into thinking the browser you’re running is actually Safari by changing the User Agent String, which is generally a pretty simple process.  In Firefox, there’s an add-on for that, as there is for Internet Explorer 8.  If you’re using Google’s Chrome, it’s a matter of copying and pasting the line in the proper location, and there’s a guide here.

You then need the right string to put in there.  For example, if you’re running Windows 7, and want Firefox to report that it’s actually Safari 4.0.5, you’d replace the existing string with:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; es-ES) AppleWebKit/531.22.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Safari/531.22.7

You can also find a pretty comprehensive list of UA strings online.  Just remember to back up the original, and this is all at your own risk, of course.  You’ll of course, get the best performance if you actually install Safari, but that defeats defining something as a ‘web standard’.