I don’t know if I’m a little late with this, I was on the Apple site this morning and saw that they have a promo box on the homepage of an HTML 5 showcase. This seems like a pretty decent resource for those of you who are either learning HTML, or are getting into the swing of things with HTML 5, and what it has to offer. The overview on the site shows you a handful of the new effects that are created with only HTML and Javascript. On viewing the page for the demos, Apple covers just about all of the newer, fancy transitions and audio/video capabilities of HTML 5 that most are looking forward to. They even have an area in the Safari Dev Center about how these demos were made. I personally don’t use Safari on my machines, I’m more of  Firefox/Chrome guy, so I was however, surprised at the fact that when I tried to view these demos the first time in Firefox or Chrome, I was prompted to download Safari, in order view them. And that was that, I had no choice but to launch Safari. I suppose this is Apples way of pushing to get a bigger share of the browser market, since Firefox dominates this area with roughly 47% of browser downloads, vs. Safari who only has around 4% share of it.

For me, and I’m sure others out there, Apple hit a big usability issue with this. When designing websites, it has always been, until I saw this demo page, that forcing browser checks and telling a user that they need a ‘specific’ browser was a big no-no. Now HTML 5 is not quite supported by all browsers as of yet, Firefox one of them, and if a website is using HTML 5 or CSS3, and should you have a non-standards compliant browser (IE), it will just strip out that part of the code and render the site as best it can. I cannot help but wonder, why Apple went his way, what ever happened to giving the user a choice? They missed the target with a general development standard. How many other designers and developers who are maybe not that experienced when it comes to usability on the web, will take a cue from this approach-especially if other sites start doing this-when developing with HTML 5, and force users to download a new browser, just to see their site rendered in HTML 5 in all its glory?