Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don, you've had a couple of great stories make it to HN recently -- awesome reads. Looking forward to reading many more.
Thank you! I'm typing as fast as I can. :)
Keep them coming, please :)
Keeping Safari a secret
61–70 of 108 posts
Re: Keeping Safari a secret
#62I distinctly remember how the web dev world (myself included) groaned at the prospect of supporting another rendering engine. Gecko was clearly the best browser at the time, and the choice of KHTML seemed bizarre, to say the least. Even the intention of Apple building it's own web browser seemed weird, Apple had failed at a previous homebrewed browser (Cyberdog), why not just build on top of what Mozilla had already…
Konqueror was by some distance the best browser available at the time (even today there is Konqueror 3.2 functionality that I can't find in anything else), and the fact that they were able to keep it that way with about 5 devs total spoke to the quality of the code.
Agree. I used KHTML (later known as Konqueror) as my primary browser (as a webdev!) since early days of KDE until I switched to Mac in 2006. Konqueror always felt right on KDE, just like Safari feels right on OS X (native feel, integration, etc).
A little feature I still miss was that you could navigate up in URL hierarchy by alt+up, just like in file-browsing mode (not sure if it's still supported by today's Konqueror).
Re: Keeping Safari a secret
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would love to claim the foresight of planning for the iPhone all along. Alas, that was not the case. :) For any of us. We built our own browser because we didn't want to depend on another company for a critical application. We built our own browser engine because we wanted to use the technology in more things than a browser. We built that engine small and fast because Bertrand Serlet would have shot me if I had don…
>We built our own [map app] because we didn't want to depend on another company for a critical application. I believe, in retrospect, Apple's Maps.app will be considered in the same league as Safari. It may have had a rougher start than Safari, but I think it's a great program.
But it's different for maps, it's not the programming that was at fault, it's the cartographic data.
And to continue the parallel, it would have probably been better for apple and everyone else if apple had just used the gecko engine for their browser.
Re: Keeping Safari a secret
#64Does anyone know why Apple stopped doing this(or stopped doing it as thoroughly)? With the possible exception of the original, sites have consistently reported visits from iOS/iPhone:iPad user agents (and claimed that the ip originated within apple) well before launch. Recent example: http://thenextweb.com/apple/2013/01/01/developers-begin-seei...
That Apple makes the iPhone and iPad is not a secret. The article you link to is talking about stats that apps are reporting over the internet... the apps have to know what kind of device they are running on, and have to be able to handle differences between the devices (eg: the screen difference between the iPhone 4S and iPhone 5). No real information is released with these hardware model numbers that's not already…
Well, you can get some real secrets by combining user agents with other data. For example: screen resolution.
Re: Keeping Safari a secret
#65"Which explains why the Safari user agent string has so much extra information in it, e.g. KHTML, like Gecko — the names of other browser engines." Wasn't Safari/WebKit largely based on KHTML in the beginning? This doesn't say it wasn't, but seems to imply that there was a separation of the two that was more complete than it really was. I realize the OP is in a better position than I to know exactly what the reasonin…
At the time, Microsoft's hegemony over the web browser market was at its peak. Firefox was the only real competitor. If web pages checked the user agent, they probably only accounted for these two browsers. Anything else fell back to legacy behavior, disabling DHTML (later called Web 2.0). This made Gmail suck. KHTML had almost no market share - it only ran on KDE, and most KDE users used Firefox. Nothing recognized…
> KHTML had almost no market share - it only ran on KDE, and most KDE users used Firefox.
As mentioned before, Firefox didn't even exist at this point. And KHTML itself actually predates Linux Gecko by a few months as well.
Don Melton forked KHTML/KJS internally in 2001, and announced the work to KDE at the beginning of 2003... GMail wasn't released until 2004!
Re: Keeping Safari a secret
#66must have been easier to use an ip filter and base the identifier on ip... duh..
A device behind a router might be unable to reliably determine its outward-facing IP.
Re: Keeping Safari a secret
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
>We built our own [map app] because we didn't want to depend on another company for a critical application. I believe, in retrospect, Apple's Maps.app will be considered in the same league as Safari. It may have had a rougher start than Safari, but I think it's a great program.
But it's different for maps, it's not the programming that was at fault, it's the cartographic data. And to continue the parallel, it would have probably been better for apple and everyone else if apple had just used the gecko engine for their browser.
It might have been better at the time to use gecko, but apparently building a new rendering engine had enough advantages that Apple decided it was worth it. In hindsight, WebKit was the right call. It's powerful enough to run advanced desktop browsers, yet lightweight enough to power (almost) the entire mobile web.
Re: Keeping Safari a secret
#68>Back around 1990, some forward-thinking IT person secured for Apple an entire Class A network of IP addresses. I found that fact to be the most interesting part of the article. The list of other Class A holders is also interesting: http://www.aturtschi.com/whois/neta1.html
I knew that going in, but only because of this: http://xkcd.com/195/
Re: Keeping Safari a secret
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
But it's different for maps, it's not the programming that was at fault, it's the cartographic data. And to continue the parallel, it would have probably been better for apple and everyone else if apple had just used the gecko engine for their browser.
It might have been better at the time to use gecko, but apparently building a new rendering engine had enough advantages that Apple decided it was worth it. In hindsight, WebKit was the right call. It's powerful enough to run advanced desktop browsers, yet lightweight enough to power (almost) the entire mobile web.
I thought that WebKit was based upon KHTML. Was it different enough upon initial release that you would consider it "building a new rendering engine"?
Re: Keeping Safari a secret
#70This blog is revealing more interesting tidbits from inside Apple than the official biographer of Steve Jobs. How sad is that?