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The new WebKit inspector may be the demonstration vehicle that convinced Apple that AJAX UIs could work, despite many people’s concerns.

Very few applications so far use HTML for rendering. Find It! Keep It!’s Database view is rendered as HTML and uses Javascript within the application. NetNewsWire’s Combined View is also implemented in this way. WebKit Inspector goes one step further, by emulating what looks to be a Cocoa app in Javascript extremely effectively. Like Find It! Keep It!, it calls native functions to perform operations that would otherwise be impossible with Javascript. However it also uses the canvas element to make its bar graphs. Its only flaw is that it does not scale correctly when you press Command + to make the text bigger.

Although most people don’t change default browser, people who use Safari at home will be tempted to use it at work on the Windows box they’re saddled with… Particularly because of the more familiar font rendering. As a result the number of Safari users will appear to double (different IP addresses, cookies, etc). This sudden increase will be hailed as remarkable, causing other people to try out the new kid on the block. As pointed out by John Gruber, Google will pay for the port by sharing ad-revenue from Safari’s search box. Apple can also expect to leverage the Itunes halo effect, especially if it bundles Safari with Itunes.

Now a wild guess: Just as Itunes is the interface for the Ipod, Safari will be part of the required interface for the iPhone, letting you share bookmarks with your phone among other things (Bonjour is installed by Safari for windows).