Safari is released to the world

http://donmelton.com/2013/01/10/safari-is-released-to-the-world/

by olivercameron • 14 years ago

425 119 14 years ago

jpxxx• 14 years ago

The KHTML library (as wrapped by KFM) was surprisingly usable back in the day on Linux. But who'da thunk it'd turn into one of the most important pieces of code in the world? Congrats to all involved.

jcitme• 14 years ago

Speaking of which, how is the KHTML (not webkit) code now?

rogerbinns• 14 years ago

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.

parfe4• 14 years ago

>one of the most important pieces of code in the world

Well, that's certainly over the top. Safari is a commodity.

Nelson69• 14 years ago

Safari, Chrome, all the non-Windows phones (iOS, android, bada, blackberry, and webOS) and some lesser uses. I think some of the embedded Netflix implementations use it.

It's pretty important.

thejosh• 14 years ago

This was posted a week ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5006397

And reposted 2 days ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5026440

edit: I'm an idiot, didn't read the post properly.

ghiculescu• 14 years ago

This is a different post.

halayli• 14 years ago

read

mxxx• 14 years ago

Yeah there's a whole bunch of them, they're different posts. I guess a couple of the Safari team dudes have started blogging recently...

mokus• 14 years ago

Interesting. 2003 - Safari launches. 2013 - a salvo of blogs is fired.

I'm thinking either an NDA just expired or a lot of folks are feeling nostalgic about the 10 year anniversary.

defap• 14 years ago

> I guess a couple of the Safari team dudes have started blogging

Both stories are from the same person.

johnpowell• 14 years ago

Thanks for these. It is awesome to see how the sausage is made.

kenneth• 14 years ago

The email Don sent to the KDE mailing list at the conference is also very much worth reading:

http://lists.kde.org/?m=104197092318639

pimeys• 14 years ago

There was also a great reply:

> On Wed, 8 Jan 2003, Vadim Plessky also wrote:

>> It seems we are very close to take market share from Microsoft :-)

> Keep on dreaming ;). Btw, markets are for selling, KDE is on the next

> plazza giving software away for free to the poor, geeks and other

> nonconformists (/me ducks).

http://lists.kde.org/?l=kfm-devel&m=104205781123001&...

bobbles• 14 years ago

So was the yelling just out of surprise that it wasnt Gecko? Or was someone pissed off that it was chosen?

donmelton4• 14 years ago

Surprise, I would hope. :) And lack of recognition, I suppose.

diminish• 14 years ago

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.

ambiguator• 14 years ago

Don Melton, welcome to my bookmark folder.

tvwonline• 14 years ago

Just watched the Keynote announcement of Safari and I finally understand what 'Snapback' is (was?)

I have been using a Mac since 2005 and never figured out what it did, then I stopped noticing it was even there.

arrrg• 14 years ago

Too late! The feature was removed (I think quite some time ago). Ok, admittedly it’s still there in the menu, but no longer given any space in the UI.

I understood what it was but I also never used it. It sounds useful, but somehow isn’t for some reason, at least that’s the case for me. I wonder whether there were ever any number of people who really used the feature.

That also goes to show that just having a useful feature isn’t enough.

I think the problem with the feature is that it isn’t useful often enough. The common case when looking at search results is to open a page, see that it isn’t the right one and go back. So just hitting the back button once is quite often all that’s needed.

Sometimes you will click through several pages before you notice that what you found isn’t quite right, but I would guess that in a majority of cases you will notice that immediately. Which means that just hitting the back button just works in a majority of cases and the Snapback function doesn’t provide any additional savings.

Moreover, the back button is probably the single most used UI element in a web browser, so everyone is really used to using it. Switching to something else that does something similar in some situations but you are not used to is a painful transition.

Also, the back button degrades gracefully: Just slamming on it until you are back where you want to also works. It might take a little more time, but it works.

So in summary, the Snapback function is only rarely actually useful compared to the back button, and if it is the back button requires only a little more effort but also works. That’s why I think it doesn’t really work.

philwelch• 14 years ago

It's also much less useful with tabbed browsing.

wahnfrieden• 14 years ago

Chrome implemented this by showing the last history item with a different host at the bottom of the list that shows if you hold down on the back button.

wildranter• 14 years ago

No wonder, the button was way too small. I was used to click it a lot, and I still miss it today. But before hitting the reply button I googled and found this extension [0]. I'm happy again.

BTW, hey Don I love your writings. Please keep writing and posting. Thanks for WebKit too!

[0] http://flipmartin.net/software/snapback.

lominming• 14 years ago

Thanks for the story! Love to hear stories from the team when Chrome was first released.

zopticity• 14 years ago

Safari is one of the best browsers I've used. It led to a better web development. If it weren't for the webkit, the might look like it's stuck in the 1990s.

gutnor• 14 years ago

It gave us something important: a third major engine (webkit in general). Standards really get taken seriously when there are more than 2 players.

shellehs2• 14 years ago

hardly using safari.

it not so fast as chrome, not have so many productive add-ons as chrome and firefox, not so flexible and customizable as firefox, not so open and powerful as firefox.

mcot2• 14 years ago

Chrome uses WebKit...

beatgammit• 14 years ago

But it has V8... but hey, what do I know, I use Opera...

shellehs2• 14 years ago

midori uses webkit too. it's not only fast , also lightweight, more than safari.

udp• 14 years ago

Your browser preference really doesn't have anything to do with this article.

dave1010uk2• 14 years ago

I'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.

Yaggo• 14 years ago

You must be kidding.

winter_blue• 14 years ago

The idea of Apple working with Nokia sound ridonkulous to you?

ConstantineXVI2• 14 years ago

WebKit core gets commits from nearly every major hardware manufacturer and OS vendor that isn't Microsoft. Unless Apple's stripping all those commits out of spite, iOS WebKit contains code from Nokia, RIM, Samsung, HPalm, Google, and many others that might be seen as competitors otherwise.

nailer• 14 years ago

Obviously the products may be been developed much earlier, but the Webkit browser on Nokia N95 was released to the market before the iPhone was released in 2007.

binarycrusader2• 14 years ago

WebKit was open sourced roughly a week (June 7, 2005) before Nokia announced the port to their phone (June 13, 2005). That means that Nokia was able to do the port in less than a week with (presumably) a few competent developers.

As the other person said, you must be kidding if you think Apple worked with Nokia.

Did you read any of the posts that have been flying by?

WebKit was a project shrouded in almost total secrecy until it's announcement as Safari and was clearly done at Apple and based on KTHML/KJS.

Not only that, what would make the mobile version "special" (besides dealing with touch input and screen resolution)? Don't you remember Jobs' comments about it being the "full" internet?

Going further, why on Earth would Apple even hint to Nokia that they were working on the iPhone?

bdash2• 14 years ago

> WebKit was open sourced roughly a week (June 7, 2005) before Nokia announced the port to their phone (June 13, 2005). That means that Nokia was able to do the port in less than a week with (presumably) a few competent developers.

While the ex-Nokia developers I've met have all been excellent engineers, they certainly didn't port WebKit to their mobile devices in under a week. June 7, 2005 marks the date that Apple started WebKit as an open source project. That is, on that date the CVS repository and Bugzilla instance were made publicly available. For over two years prior to that point Apple had been publishing the source code of the two main components of WebKit, JavaScriptCore and WebCore, alongside Safari releases. Nokia's port of WebKit to Symbian was based on those releases, and it wasn't until late 2006[1] that Nokia started developing against the current WebKit SVN repository.

[1] http://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11540

IheartApplesDix• 14 years ago

Wow this is really great. Safari use is increasing all the time. KHTML originally came from KDE of Linux fame, and has good support for most HTML standards, making it a wonderful language to start with.

nodesocket• 14 years ago

2003 Safari keynote by the master himself, Steve Jobs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_ZNXQujgXw

It's so crazy to watch the demo, and see all the absolute crap websites back then. How far we have come.

What will the web look like in another 10 years?

kawsper2• 14 years ago

And the presentation writes CCS1 and CCS2, instead of CSS1 and CSS2 :-) I think that was the reason that it was skipped that fast.

mcpoulet• 14 years ago

At what time is that in the video ? I didn't see it.

meerita• 14 years ago

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.

michael_miller• 14 years ago

Don, 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!

ricardobeat2• 14 years ago

webkit.org has many posts detailing bits of the implementation. Here's a series on rendering: https://www.webkit.org/blog/114/webcore-rendering-i-the-basi...

bad_user• 14 years ago

Breathtaking how a small project created by enthusiasts can change the world. I also loved the end of this post, WTF indeed :-)

frozenport2• 14 years ago

Why did Apple feel the need to make a web browser?

flyinRyan• 14 years ago

Because the existing ones all sucked?

chewxy• 14 years ago

From Don Melton's Mouth [0]:

    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 done otherwise. :)

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5006704

podperson5• 14 years ago

Apple had been dependent on Microsoft and Netscape for good browser options. Microsoft released IE5.5 for Mac which was neither IE5 nor IE6 compatible, and then nothing. Netscape gradually turned into a gigantic steaming pile of crap.

I might add that Chimera -> Camino was the beacon of hope before Safari came out, and once it got going on Mac OS X, other folks got so excited they demanded a cross-platform version which eventually became Firefox.

In general, the need for a non-sucky non-bloated web browser alternative to IE reached a critical mass at that time, not just on Mac OS X.

sarvinc2• 14 years ago

"I might add that Chimera -> Camino was the beacon of hope before Safari came out, and once it got going on Mac OS X, other folks got so excited they demanded a cross-platform version which eventually became Firefox."

I'd never heard this and I can't seem to find any references to it. Would you mind pointing me in the right direction?

sazary2• 14 years ago

maybe every reason of making iOS Maps is acceptable here too.

albertzeyer• 14 years ago

What happened to KWQ? This looks like a great starting point when you want to port some KDE/Qt lib to native Cocoa. For example, I'm thinking about KDevelop, Amarok or others.

lucian1900• 14 years ago

Nowadays there isn't much need to port, since Qt has a good native Cocoa backend.

randallu• 14 years ago

KWQ wasn't super easy to port to other platforms -- it's completely gone now and WebKit has much better abstractions.

eertami• 14 years ago

I enjoyed the CES keynote he linked to much more than any Apple keynote.

kawsper2• 14 years ago

> But we did have great seats, just a few rows from the front — you didn’t want to be too close in case something really went wrong.

I wonder what that means.

ZeroGravitas2• 14 years ago

Possibly a reference to the time a camera didn't work for Steve during a keynote and got thrown (fairly swiftly) at/to an employee in the first row.

http://youtu.be/mZG1ewSO0X4?t=1m10s

enneff2• 14 years ago

I'm guessing that he didn't want it to be his sheepish face that Steve saw when searching for someone to blame.

chiph• 14 years ago

Don - you had several plugins available from launch - Flash, etc. How'd you do that without tipping your hand?

SG-3• 14 years ago

They were simply using the standard OSX browser plugins (the same Mozilla, Camino and IE used at the time).

nossralf• 14 years ago

Safari implements NPAPI [1] and could probably reuse any NPAPI plugin that existed on OS X at the time right off the bat.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPAPI

brown9-2• 14 years ago

The mention of needing to keep the project a secret makes me wonder what would have been so different about things had the news leaked.

Let's say the browser user agent leaked or some enterprising reporter figured out what Apple was up to. What would have gone differently in that alternate universe?

sazary2• 14 years ago

maybe nothing other than an angry steve and a not-that-fascinating-presentation.

SG-3• 14 years ago

Probably some bad things, over the years certain project details have leaked right before the keynote (such as ATI pre-announcing a hardware release) and finding Apple switching to NVIDIA for the next few years.

smackfu2• 14 years ago

Why are there so few insider stories from Apple? Is it forever NDAs? Not many people retiring yet? Loyalty?

These blog posts are really standing out as actually giving a view inside the company.

podperson5• 14 years ago

http://folklore.org/index.py

smackfu2• 14 years ago

Since those are all about original Mac from 30 years ago, that makes the "people only talk when they retire" seem more plausible.

joezydeco2• 14 years ago

I hold hope that one day we'll have a folklore.org equivalent for the period where Steve returned to Apple up to the iPhone or thereabouts. Even a "Soul of a New Machine"-type book about the development of some products (iPod, iPhone, OSX) would be interesting.

In either case, Don, thanks for these stories. Any insight at all into how the sausage gets made is a great read.

jfb3• 14 years ago

There is a strong sense, even among ex-Apple employees, that the company's secrets are not for sharing. As one person's fascinating anecdote is another's secret, most tend to keep circumspect. Too, it's fairly common for ex-Apple employees to come back to the mothership, so there's also a "don't burn your bridges" aspect to the whole thing.

SG-3• 14 years ago

Reading the part about him cringing on the demo made me think of this:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/6/9/

abdophoto• 14 years ago

Man, what an incredible story. Thanks Don Melton!

DigitalJack• 14 years ago

Money Quote: There’s nothing that can fill your underwear faster than seeing your product fail during a Steve Jobs demo.

jlkinsel• 14 years ago

awesome ending :)

bulletmagnet• 14 years ago

It is ironic that the only Apple product we're getting an overdose of play-by-play insider information about development and launch is the one people care the least about: Safari.

sbuk• 14 years ago

As pointed out earlier in the thread, the significance is not Safari but WebKit, which is now used by the majority of the software that is used to view web content. The reason WebKit was originally developed is Safari.

Safari is released to the world

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