71–80 of 108 posts
This blog is revealing more interesting tidbits from inside Apple than the official biographer of Steve Jobs. How sad is that?
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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 Konquer…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Konquer…
I 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…
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…
To drive home Don's point about how secret Alexander was: I was given official access to Marklar months before Alexander. Since there was no Rosetta at that time the Intel builds of OS X had no bundled web browser (and porting Chimera or Mozilla were clearly nowhere on that team's priority list at the time, for obvious reasons). I was eventually given access to Alexander largely because I was doing enough Intel related work that it was necessary to have access to a browser on my Intel machines.
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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"?
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>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.
In what way?
WebKit seems to have enjoyed some success since then... since Chrome toppled both Internet Explorer and Firefox.
This still makes me think that Ninjas work at Apple. How other can they evade such a public part of the interwebs? http://www.askaninja.com/ I guess.
I 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…
I suspect the reason for choosing KHTML over Gecko may have been more political than anything else. Since Mozilla was the dominant non-IE browser at the time, it would be hard to justify any fork to the community without meaningfully given back. For example, Apple could go off into a cave and add touch handling support with momentum scrolling and GPU acceleration, and the Mozilla community would be absolutely furious…
To make matters worse, unlike Microsoft's version, the Mozilla version needed to support multiple OSes and multiple compilers.
Because of that, I believe Apple's claim that the choice for KHTML was on technical grounds.
(I don't remember whether Mozilla already used XUL at the time. If so, that could have been another argument for choosing KHTML)