You’ll need either an Apple News+ or Wall Street Journal subscription to read this article, my apologies in advance if you’re unable to read it.
I found this article and the concept of an Enterprise level browser intriguing. Given that Apple is a consumer focus company, I wonder if Apple will consider it in their best interest to develop an enterprise level browser.
It wouldn’t be a stretch for Apple to do so. They already have Managed Apple IDs and Safari syncing for iCloud. I feel the blocking blocks are already there.
Apple made a windows version of Safari from 2007 to 2012 but it never gained any market share. And they abandoned their last attempt at enterprise hardware in 2011.
Other than iTunes Apple hasn’t had much success producing Windows software, and they have no experience in the enterprise.
I feel like many, if not most, businesses that deploy Macs live in Google Workspace and Google Chrome so I wonder how big the market for an “enterprise” Safari would be. I do like the idea of building a single view out of many different web pages though.
Apple doesn’t even have an enterprise solution to manage Macs. They have left that market to companies like Jamf.
I don’t see them ever trying to develop a product to centrally manage tens of thousands of browsers. Right now, AFAIK, Google owns that market.
I agree. Safari is quintessentially a consumer browser, and other than its tight integration with Apple’s OSs and hardware, which enables things like superior battery life on MacBooks, there’s little or nothing that’s special or innovative about it.
Look at what Vivaldi and Arc have done in much less time, and with much smaller teams and financial resources, or the enterprise-specific companies in the WSJ article tailoring specialized browsers to the needs of that market in ways I’ve never heard of before.
I doubt Apple is going to try to produce an enterprise browser without a major strategic shift toward catering to enterprises in a sustained and systematic way.
But I could def see Arc going that way. They have a lot of VCs breathing down their necks, and Arc is great for running SaaS apps, which is what the enterprise browsers seem focused on.
I can see Apple entering Search, but based on the search function in the App Store they would be starting at the back of the pack, IMO.
Apple has always wanted to get into advertising but has been limited to the App Store since iAds failed to take off. They know everything about us so they could make a killing selling targeted advertisements if they had their own search engine.
For that reason they’d probably start by buying an existing search engine like Kagi, or even several.
I’ve not read the article, but on the assumption thaty any Enterprise browser would need to protect security and privacy, I assume that the producing companies would need Enterprises to pay for them, and that’s where they’d struggle. If a “consumer” browser is good enough, why would they pay.
Microsoft aren’t about to abandon Edge or degrade it so that they can sell a higher class of browser.
You can’t win in the “enterprise browser” market without owning the employee identity and tools. Apple is not there and being focused on consumer stuff, I don’t think they will ever be.
Microsoft, on the other hand, as a “enterprise version” of Edge that is already seamlessly built in in Edge. You just have to set-up sync with your company credentials and bam! you are in the “enterprise version”. Which, as far as I know, only has a couple of end user facing features (Edge Workspaces were an Edge for Business only feature but I see it has been deployed to regular edge these days), perhaps the most notorious thing is that the embedded Copilot assistant is using a company-level agreement and thus makes IT security staff happy.
I agree. Although IBM famously found that TCO for Macs was lower than for Windows devices, I think by far the biggest thing driving Apple sales into enterprises (to the extent that it exists) is that their officers and employees have personal Macs, iPhones, and iPads and want the same experience at work. I expect Apple’s main focus to remain on consumers, creatives, and developers.