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Keeping Safari a secret

donmelton.com

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Re: Keeping Safari a secret

#91

Post by ramses0 »

daxelrod wrote: post #69
jdechko wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

Mozilla was a bridge to step away from IE and "Made for IE" sites.

It's goal was "bug-for-bug compatability with IE" so that you could run Mozilla / Netscape on websites that weren't updated / weren't ever going to be updated.

KHTML / Konqueror was effectively "strict-mode-only" not caring (as much) if sites broke, but implementing things "as sanely as possible".

Firefox was Mozilla with a sane UI on top of it.

Mozilla UI was trash because goofballs in suits kept ruining it by pushing for "site-specific-themes paid for by advertisers" which caused the "chrome" to be incredibly buggy / slow / etc.

WebKit / Safari was Apple delicately picking up KHTML, making the "hard" decisions to implement some things poorly / hackily / different / more quickly than the "purist" open source KHTML volunteer developers had envisioned.

They actually handled it overall quite well, as opposed to their other forays into open-source land (kernel / darwin, cups, etc).

WebKit is excellent now because it didn't have to start with that bridge step, and had speed / correctness / isolation as a focus from the start. So even though WebKit is the current "leader", it owes a lot to Mozilla for doing the hard grunt-work that allowed it to take cover behind the big lumbering dinosaur and come out unscathed on the other side.

Re: Keeping Safari a secret

#92

Post by sbuk »

sbuk wrote: post #89
neumann_alfred wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WekKit also isn't Safari, is it. I was referring to the reasons to keep bespoke Safari "secret" and the ways to do so... as in, to the actual fucking article, not "Apple success porn" in general, or whatever "sensibilities" I might have offended here.

Wow.

Ok. I was responding to you rather arrogant assertion that Don's interesting article was "meh". I'd argue that neither WebKit or Safari are trivial. WebKit is arguably the biggest HTML renderer out there and a heck of a lot of people access the internet using Safari. It's fine that you didn't find it interesting, really, that's ok, just don't be a dick about it.

Re: Keeping Safari a secret

#93

Post by petemc_ »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #71
smackfu wrote: post #70

This blog is revealing more interesting tidbits from inside Apple than the official biographer of Steve Jobs. How sad is that?

Quite sad, but not honestly surprising. That was a biography made to be mainstream, to tell the general public how glorious Steve supposedly was.

I take it you didn't read it.

Re: Keeping Safari a secret

#94

Post by Tloewald »

hnriot wrote: post #63
officemonkey wrote: post #59

Earlier 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.

Presumably, by your logic, Google and Adobe were wrong to adopt webkit instead of Gecko too.

Re: Keeping Safari a secret

#95

Post by Tloewald »

Someone wrote: post #81
duopixel wrote: post #40

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 not call Cyberdog a failure. Yes, it wasn't fast and it didn't have a great rendering engine, but frankly, neither did the competition, and I found its look and feel so good that I kept using it for a long time (with IE as a backup for pages it did not handle, IIRC) OpenDoc, on which it was built, failed, but even that, I would not call a complete failure. It may have just been bad timing (of the Newton vs iP…

Agreed — Cyberdog was the best thing about OpenDoc.

Re: Keeping Safari a secret

#96

Post by Tloewald »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #41

Interesting, I wonder if it would be possible to start a rumour by having a number of people spoof their user-agent string? Sure , they wouldn't route back to an Apple IP address but then who's to say Apple doesn't browse via proxy/vpn somewhere?

No-one would credit rumors that Apple was wasting its time creating a new browser.

Re: Keeping Safari a secret

#97

Post by Tloewald »

robmcm wrote: post #51
markrages wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing it's not a secret or surprise to anyone that Apple would work on a new version of their operating system, nor that such operating system would include a browser. Safari, on the other hand, was unexpected.

Also, what were the chances that someone would even notice "Safari" in their log files had it of slipped out, vs some stats company who only work on iPhones noticing a new iPhone version. Apple 10 years ago < Apple now

Apple was big news in the tech industry even at its nadir. To quote (roughly from memory) BYTE in 1994 -- the history of the computer industry over the last ten years has consisted of following Apple.

Re: Keeping Safari a secret

#98

Post by mpyne »

schrodinger wrote: post #75
daxelrod wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

I remember using KHTML back before Safari was out, and it was wayyy behind Firefox. I'd bet that KHTML was mostly just a sane starting point that needed a significant amount of work to complete with IE/Firefox.

Safari pre-dated Firefox, so something about your recollection is a bit off here. Perhaps you're thinking of SeaMonkey or Phoenix as the point of comparison?

Either way according to Wikipedia, Don had forked KHTML/KJS in 2001 (which pre-dated the first public release of Phoenix by a year or so), so his choices were to hack SeaMonkey into something suitable or to start from somewhere else.

Re: Keeping Safari a secret

#99

Post by stock_toaster »

jmspring wrote: post #27
zalew wrote: post #7

TLDR: for whatever reasons it was a very top-secret project, so they spoofed the user agent, the end.

Sometimes the backstory makes for a fun read. Looking for the cliff notes version all the time makes life boring.

Well said.

Definitely a case where it wasn't the destination so much as the journey that was interesting. :)

Re: Keeping Safari a secret

#100

Post by hackmiester »

glhaynes wrote: post #84
Yaggo wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's nice one! )Although not nearby as intuitive as +up.)

Not sure I agree — its standard for OS X documents to show their hierarchy when their title bar is command-clicked; cmd-up arrow is much less broadly used.

It's not only standard Mac OS X behavior, but Mac OS in general. I learned this trick in System 7, and I believe it was around for some time before then.
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