This story owns. I really enjoyed it. It brings a lot of clarity to the whole past. I hope more guys at Apple could share those stories.
Safari is released to the world
41–50 of 127 posts
Re: Safari is released to the world
#42Don, a great blog post! It's really fascinating to hear about what goes on between the inception of a project and its release at an Apple keynote.
I would be interested in hearing more about the technical side of WebKit. How does it work at a high level? How are touch events handled? What fancy things are done (within your NDA restrictions) to make scrolling so fast on the iPhone? It would be really awesome if you wrote a series of blog posts talking about the structure of WebKit!
Re: Safari is released to the world
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wikpedia has one paragraph at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit#Origins "However, the exchange of code patches between the two branches of KHTML has previously been difficult and the code base diverged because both projects had different approaches in coding." It has a link to this post http://blogs.kde.org/node/1001 from 2005 saying there isn't much hope. It would be nice to have a 2013 update.
I can't comment on the state of things today, but I was active an active KDE core developer at the time from that original message to the time of the Zack's blog post (and I'm friends with both Dirk and Zack): There was a huge amount of excitement at the announcement that Safari would be using KHTML. At that time, it was almost a given that the OSS rendering engine was Gecko. KHTML was KDE's little engine that could…
This matches my recollection of things as someone that followed WebKit from shortly after Safari was announced, and became actively involved when the open source project proper started up in 2005.
Re: Safari is released to the world
#44Breathtaking how a small project created by enthusiasts can change the world. I also loved the end of this post, WTF indeed :-)
Re: Safari is released to the world
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wikpedia has one paragraph at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit#Origins "However, the exchange of code patches between the two branches of KHTML has previously been difficult and the code base diverged because both projects had different approaches in coding." It has a link to this post http://blogs.kde.org/node/1001 from 2005 saying there isn't much hope. It would be nice to have a 2013 update.
I can't comment on the state of things today, but I was active an active KDE core developer at the time from that original message to the time of the Zack's blog post (and I'm friends with both Dirk and Zack): There was a huge amount of excitement at the announcement that Safari would be using KHTML. At that time, it was almost a given that the OSS rendering engine was Gecko. KHTML was KDE's little engine that could…
This is great summary. Thanks.
Re: Safari is released to the world
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surprise, I would hope. :) And lack of recognition, I suppose.
Don, i am trying to understand why you (not you in person but Apple) went the open source route for safari but not for itunes etc. Can it be that, at that moment when you made the decision, web sites 'made for internet explorer', were too many. And you wanted the rendering engine on Mac to be widespread by getting from and giving to an open source project.
Same reason that most companies that go open-source do so: because they were innovating from underneath, entering a market with much more dominant players. Would Android be open-source if the iPhone hadn't been so dominant at the time?
Re: Safari is released to the world
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chrome uses WebKit...
midori uses webkit too. it's not only fast , also lightweight, more than safari.
right, so what mcot2 is saying is that you're using most of safari anyway. safari was just a thin shell on top of webkit. I'm sure apple spent most of it's time improving webkit and not much time making the UI shell around it.
Re: Safari is released to the world
#48I'd like to hear about how WebKit went mobile for the iPhone. Eg if Apple worked with Nokia and their port of WebKit to Symbian, or started their own port from scratch.
You must be kidding.
Re: Safari is released to the world
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neither, really. It's mostly because I retired.
So I'm curious. As a young programmer with 1.5 years before entering the workforce I have to wonder what you plan to do. From my super young and inexperienced perspective retirement will just mean having more control over my programming. Is programming still super fun and adicting? So; what do you plan to do? A relaxed retirement? Occasional contracting? A startup? Open source? Quiting programming forever and travell…
I believe he is attempting to be a writer.
Re: Safari is released to the world
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surprise, I would hope. :) And lack of recognition, I suppose.
Don, i am trying to understand why you (not you in person but Apple) went the open source route for safari but not for itunes etc. Can it be that, at that moment when you made the decision, web sites 'made for internet explorer', were too many. And you wanted the rendering engine on Mac to be widespread by getting from and giving to an open source project.
This is a silly question. iTunes makes tons of money while Safari is an OS X feature.