After relying on third parties for several years – Internet Explorer, Netscape – Apple decided that it was time to take matters into its own hands. It was time Apple created its own browser (again). And so, Safari was born, and released unto the world ten years ago. These past few weeks, Don Melton, the project lead for Safari and WebKit, has been sharing a lot of interesting stories about the origins and development of Apple’s browser.
Yesterday, Melton published a story about Safari’s unveiling during Steve Jobs’ keynote at MacWorld, 7 January 2003. The few Safari engineers in the audience that day were tense as all hell, afraid something would go wrong during the long demonstration Jobs gave on the stage. Safari has issues with its networking code for months now, and during rehearsals, Safari froze up entirely. This turned out to be a network connection issue, but still – stress all around.
“Demo time,” Melton recalls, “And for the entire six minutes and 32 seconds that Steve used Safari on stage, I don’t remember taking a single breath. I was thinking about that network failure during rehearsal and screaming inside my head, ‘Stay online, stay online!’. We only had one chance to make a first impression.”
It must be an incredible feeling to work on something as crucial as a web browser, trying to fulfil Steve Jobs’ high standards, and then having to relinquish all control to the presentation team. During those 6 minutes and 32 seconds, the future of your career hangs in the balance, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do. Will your code work as it should, or will it fail spectacularly?
“Of course, Steve, Safari and the network performed flawlessly. I shouldn’t have worried”, Melton writes. I can’t imagine how that must’ve felt.
According to Melton, the audience was convinced about what would follow after the demo. Steve Jobs extolled the virtues of building Safari on top of an open source rendering engine, and everyone in the audience knew that the following five letters would appear on screen: “Gecko”. Instead, when Jobs went to the next slide, five completely different, large, white letters looked down upon the audience, in much the same way Bill Gates had done before six years ealier.
KHTML.
“What you also can’t hear on the video is someone about 15 to 20 rows behind where we were sitting – obviously expecting the word ‘Gecko’ up there – shout at what seemed like the top of his lungs: ‘WHAT THE FUCK!?'” Melton recalls, “KHTML may have been a bigger surprise than Apple doing a browser at all. And that moment was glorious. We had punk’d the entire crowd.”
In the near future, Melton will publish a post about why the company chose KDE’s KHTML, but he already shed some light on it the day Safari was unveiled. Straight from MacWorld, he sent a long email to the relevant KHTML/KDE mailing list, thanking them for their hard work on KHTML, and explaining why KHTML was chosen.
“When we were evaluating technologies over a year ago, KHTML and KJS stood out,” the email details, “Not only were they the basis of an excellent modern and standards compliant web browser, they were also less than 140,000 lines of code. The size of your code and ease of development within that code made it a better choice for us than other open source projects. Your clean design was also a plus.”
Of course, the most important benefit the world gained from Safari is not the browser itself. Safari, as a desktop browser, is rather mediocre, and personally I can’t think of a single reason why you would opt for it over Chrome or Firefox. On mobile, however, Safari is still my favourite browser of all. IE10 on WP8 still has some rendering issues to work out but is otherwise fairly close when it comes to fluidity and speed, while on Android, the browser situation is terrible.
No, the big thing the world gained that January day in 2003 was the evolution of KHTML, now known as WebKit. A fast and modern open source rendering engine that revolutionised mobile browsing and made it possible for several smaller projects – like Haiku – to gain a standards compliant, modern, and fast browser.
Ten years ago, Apple and KDE gave the world WebKit. Thanks.
Though I’m not fan of a lot of Apple’s practices, that they (both as a competitor to windows and to IE) helped to solidify an open web and web standards in the market place is clear. Competition is good, and there needed to be a company willing and able to stand defiant to the Microsoft monopoly machine. For the space made available for competition, for WebKit, for clang, for so many reasons, the open source community has benefited from Apple. Glad to see them get some credit now that the trendy thing to do seems to be Apple bashing.
When it comes to bashing apple and nonsense postings, I must say that I am very trendy
You my friend seem to be living in the lala land. Apple and safari are not even close to being competitors of any influence to windows or IE. Had you said (in terms of servers) linux and among browsers firefox I might have subscribed to what you are posting. As for open standards, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Apple would destroy them if they could. Decision to use open source rendering engine was driven by pure pragmatic reasons, namely Apple cannot sustain heavy software development. They are aware of this therefore they grab whatever they can and modify it. Open source has benefited far less from Apple, compared with how much has apple benefited from open source!!
I believe his point is that Apple took KHTML and created the (far more portable) WebKit, which in turn has become the basis of Chrome and a whole bunch of other Open Source web browsers. Without that work KHTML would likely have remained firmly wedded to KDE, and we’d be looking at Firefox and a few larger projects struggling along trying to keep their ports of Gecko up to date.
Not to mention that the number of users on WebKit certainly DO compete hugely with IE if you include mobile & tablet numbers, and Apple with iOS (and Chrome/Android, which you’ll have to forgive me for calling an sort of Safari/iOS knockoffs
) crushed Microsoft like a grape in the mobile space, which is a LOT of users.
Samsung announcing they’re not going to bother trying to do Windows RT tablets in the US market is not a sign of strength for Microsoft at this time no matter how much people want to pretend Apple didn’t hugely influence the current market.
No I didn’t include mobile and tablet as microsoft hardly has a monopoly there. It was Apple that had a monopoly (emphasis on had). It is in the PC segment that safari has failed miserably to present a meaningfull competition. Samsung has a choice to make and it would seem it is siding with google on this one, however we were not discussing tablets because MS did not have a monopoly there either ….
May I ask if you are stupid or just an apple fanboi
The amount of mobile browsing is still a small minority, compared to the desktop: http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_vs_desktop-ww-monthly-200807-2013…
But of course, on the desktop Webkit is now also dominant, as Chrome: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-200807-201301
What’s wrong with pragmatic? I far prefer a pragmatist to a ideologue. And what’s wrong with Apple benefiting more than ‘open source’ (as if it were one coherent community), so long as the wider open source community benefits to some degree too.
Its called enlightened self interest, and its a damned good principle to run a company division on, not just for the division and the company, but for the industry and the customers too.
Chrome is ahead of Firefox. And Chrome is also Webkit, giving large amount of influence to what Apple is doing with Safari.
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-200807-201301
We must not forget what happened after WebKit was released. Remember that WebKit code was usually released as a set of huge, unmanageable patches that couldn’t help the KHTML team. After the KHTML folks complained, the WebKit project started being more community-friendly. This is the bit worth praising and indeed it deserves praise.
Still, KHTML was the second browser to pass ACID2 (after safari) test and those unmanageable patch did help a little. But yes, WebKit made the real step forward. The KHTML devs may hate this, but WebKit _is_ the future of web browser.
I think it’s fair to say that KHTML was an excellent engine, but WebKit made it a framework.
I’ve worked on ports of both KHTML (ABrowse) and WebKit (Webster) and the difference is night and day.
WRT how far Webkit went as a framework – it’s somewhat ironic that the largest user of Webkit, Chrome, utilises Gtk+ in its Linux version…
I don’t think the KHTML devs hate WebKit, on the contrary. And after KDE 4.5 you can also use Konqueror with WebKit instead of KHTML.
They certainly did for a while. There were a great many calls to replace khtml and kjs with webkit earlier on 4.x but the devs always seemed to use FUDdy reasons for not doing so. They could have just said that they preferred working on khtml, but instead came up with other reasons.
Edited 2013-01-12 16:12 UTC
“Yesterday, Melton published a story about Safari’s unveiling during Steve Jobs’ keynote at MacWorld, 7 January 2013.”
You might want to -10 that year
No. No. It’s just proof that Steve Jobs is now a zombie.
One additional thing that is easily overlooked happened at the very moment.
Years of FUD spread against usage of LGPL code in proprietary products want up in a puff of smoke.
What FUD against LGPL? I’ve seen both FUD and legitimate concerns about the effect the GPL has on proprietary software that links to it, but never LGPL, for the simple reason that the LGPL was created in response to the FUD.
But, I’ve never seen anti-LGPL FUD. Is that a real thing?
Unlike the iTunes store, there’s actually very healthy competition between browsers on Android and the best of them are actually very good indeed. Just because Chrome isn’t that good on Android, doesn’t mean its competition isn’t.
Obvious examples (I’ll leave out Mini and Beta versions) include:
* Firefox (the one I use personally)
* Opera
* Dolphin
* Maxthon
* One Browser
* UC Browser
* Ninesky
(and there are many more)
If you don’t like one browser, move into the next. You don’t get anywhere near that browser choice on other mobile platforms.
As for Safari, the Windows version appears to be dead (withdrawn from Apple’s site) and the Mac versions are just average at best.
Firefox Mobile was better before the new UI. It was the most awesome thing to use, now it is as bad as the other ones.
(still use it)
Just when I started reading this, using Safari, iTunes decided to play a song by The Beatles, one of Steve’s favorite bands.
Wouldn’t it be great to have iTunes play music based on what you’re doing? Well, probably not.
It would be nice if Safari got more love from Apple. It seems they do just enough on a number of products to keep them going, this includes Safari.
It would be great, I think. It could make me use iTunes from time to time, instead of foobar2000.
(a soundtrack of your life; that’s kinda the idea with my Last.fm profile)
I hate the browser, everything is hidden for the sake of it. Developer tools while pretty decent are a pain in the arse to fire up on Windows and the Windows and Mac versions behave differently.
I use Safari as my default browser. Briefly during Lion, Safari was buggy so I used Chrome, after Mountain Lion I went back to Safari because it is just better, at least on OS X.
hehe… German school!
@vanders what would you say that it is a minimum speed of CPU for Webster?
Edited 2013-01-12 07:35 UTC
Pretty sure you meant to type “2003” instead of “2013” for Job’s original keynote at Macworld. Confused me mightily there for a few moments
Edited 2013-01-12 11:30 UTC
it was a historic!
Even when alternative browsers existed there were banks and governments that required IE since the Windows install base was so large.
As the Mac base grew those organizations felt more pressure to replace IE dependent services.
The reason Apple made its own web browser is simple. Before Safaris’ release browsing on OS X was slower than any other platform and there was no willingness to fix it.
Microsoft would say it was slower because you are using a mac and mozilla due to the troubles it was going through did not do anything either.
The release of Safari lit a fire under other developers and their products were improved, except for IE and you might say the death of it improved the experience somewhat.
Apple will go out of their way to disrupt other businesses when they could be doing better things for the platform and refuse to do so.
A good example is Adobe and video editing. Apple bought the software it made into Final Cut because Adobe refused to update Premiere for the G3 machines that were just released, having stopped licensing computers and allowing access to hardware Avid were not making machines using the G3 either.
Hmmmm… I used Camino back in the day and that was pretty usable and never seemed slow.
Camino was pretty good, but all mac browsers were slower than the windows version of Internet Explorer.
I may have been a little harsh before. IE for the mac was a good browser though I preferred Netscape at the time.
I remember Netscape and IE being horrible under Mac OS 9, but I only used OS X regularly from Jaguar onwards. I can’t remember if IE was still around by that point. Camino under Panther was very pleasant from what I remember. Though, I’m sure it would seem slow now.
OSX was generally slow back then… the silly Apple PR of “PowerPC ‘supercomputer on a chip’ G4” (based on few hand-picked Photoshop benchmarks) didn’t change that.
No, Chrome did that half a decade later. The times between the release of Safari and Chrome were the years of IE6 & stagnation.
Double post
Edited 2013-01-13 22:40 UTC