Dave Hyatt has has a post titled A Night Away From the Opera. He points to John Gruber as having "an excellent blog up about Opera's potential withdrawal from the Mac platform". I have to agree with lots of Gruber's points. Opera's comments about Apple and Safari sound to me like an excuse. An excuse for taking forever to come up with a stable (Is the current release stable? I think they have a non beta release out) version of Opera for OS X. And one that hasn't been able to compete much with any of the other browsers.
On a somewhat related note, I found the last paragraph of Gruber's post interesting.
And thus there is a difference between when Apple steps on the toes of cross-platform developers like Opera and Netscape, and when they do it to Mac-only developers like Karelia. Watson is exactly the sort of third-party software Apple needs for the Mac: original, useful, fun, and only for the Mac. Opera is exactly what Apple doesnât need: exactly like the Windows version, but six months behind.
This is related to my post of a day or so ago about an interview with the CEO of "The Omni Group", Ken Case. I actually think people that say Apple is stifling other developers could learn something from this interview. Let's look at the case of Watson. yes, Apple released the updated Sherlock that had much of the functionality of Watson. But how much have you heard about it since? There's an SDK kit out, I think that's all the news I've heard since it was released. I just pulled up the home page for Watson and you get the feeling that there's a lot of stuff going on there. The Sherlock page doesn't look like it's been updated since it was released.
