Greetings from the Safari team at Apple Computer (2003)

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

by thealphanerd • 14 years ago

165 51 14 years ago

lists.kde.org

niggler• 14 years ago

Wow, the original submission which linked to this article (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5041354, http://donmelton.com/2013/01/10/safari-is-released-to-the-wo...) is #1 and this submission is #4

damian2000• 14 years ago

Its a great story ... and marks the beginning of WebKit.

makomk• 14 years ago

And the end of KHTML. Apple changed WebKit enough that the patches couldn't be merged upstream since kdelibs has to maintain ABI compatibility across minor releases, so it gradually became more unmaintained and less usable. The KDE project couldn't kill it off since other applications relied on it being there, but they couldn't find enough developers to actually keep it working either.

thealphanerd2• 14 years ago

There were quite a few links in that article. I found this email of particular interest and importance.

nailer2• 14 years ago

+1 There's still far too many people in the tech community who seem to think that WebKit was created from scratch by Apple who just felt like being generous by making it Open Source.

worldsayshi• 14 years ago

Apple willingly releasing open source stuff feels rather counter to some of their other philosophy. (still)

thealphanerd2• 14 years ago

Well this was also after a year of working on a fork in seclusion. The project by then had diverged quite a bit, and had quite a differing philosophy from the original.

taligent2• 14 years ago

Actually open source has been a huge part of Apple ever since they acquired NeXT (or was it the other way around). The majority of OSX/iOS is open source and they have contributed in big ways to a number of projects e.g. LLVM, OpenCL, GCD, LaunchD, ZeroConf.

http://www.opensource.apple.com

It's really just a perception problem on your part.

archangel_one• 14 years ago

> The majority of OSX/iOS is open source

Really? Large chunks of both are not, so how do you know it's the majority of it that is?

patrickaljord• 14 years ago

They didn't release anything willingly. KHTML was LGPL so they were forced by the license to release it as open source. However the LGPL allows building apps on top of libs without releasing them as open source though and that's what apple did, they did not release Safari as open source, only webkit. So everything they could release as proprietary they did, they only open sourced the parts they were forced to.

To be fair, they later rewrote KJS as JavaScriptCore and released it as open source using the BSD license, and also WebCore and more. See http://apple.com/opensource/ for more. By that time, many companies including Microsoft realized that releasing and contributing to open source was not only beneficial but also unavoidable.

micampe• 14 years ago

They were forced to release the code by the license, but they picked the code knowing that from the beginning.

rahoulb3• 14 years ago

Back in those days, Apple was all about open-source - I still have an OSX 10.2 (Jaguar) box somewhere where the main headline is about Apple and open-source.

(Just found this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevenf/5393674266/)

I guess there's still a lot of open-source in OSX, but they don't need to shout about it now that they are no longer the underdogs.

eps• 14 years ago

I think they were just trying to piggy-back on BSD reputation as stable and mature system, so they played the buddy-buddy card. Once OS X settled in its place, this was no longer needed, so the open source love faded.

microtherion• 14 years ago

While there might be less shouting about open source contributions nowadays, arguably the contributions themselves are much more useful.

Certainly WebKit has been widely adopted outside Apple, clang/llvm is slowly, but surely gaining converts, and libdispatch is IMHO deserving of wider interest, even though it may not be widely adopted on non-Apple platforms.

jheimark• 14 years ago

I am surprised at how heavily the number of lines of code factored into the decision to choose KHTML. It makes sense that a smaller codebase is much easier to jump into, and usually means cleaner architecture, but I didn't expect to see it addressed as such an important factor.

pavlov• 14 years ago

At the time the minimum RAM requirement for Mac OS X was only 128 MB. WebKit was to be a system component, so it would be active in memory much of the time. Under these circumstances every MB of code counts, so it's easy to see why the leaner codebase of KHTML was found appealing.

However, I think there was also the psychological factor of Mozilla's reputation at the time as an open-source quagmire. The Netscape 4 code they had inherited was deemed unmaintainable, and so Mozilla started over with a rewrite that many thought was too complex and tried to reinvent everything under the sun (e.g. it contained a version of Microsoft's COM). Mozilla turned out fine eventually, but back in 2002 this wasn't quite so obvious.

toyg• 14 years ago

> Mozilla turned out fine

Not exactly. There's a reason WebKit saw wild adoption by all sorts of projects, while Gecko adoption stagnated. The Mozilla codebase is still too complicated for most people.

yuhong• 14 years ago

Yea, the Mariner cancellation meant that Netscape had no browser to compete in time for IE5, and Netscape 4 had many problems.

tantalor• 14 years ago

A significantly smaller codebase should produce a faster engine. Generally less work on the CPU.

nsomaru• 14 years ago

just in case you're wondering why you were downvoted (I can't do that myself) -- size of code has almost 0 relation with CPU time. A small algorithm could be extremely computationally intensive

rwinn• 14 years ago

So when did KHTML become WebKit?

Samuel_Michon• 14 years ago

It didn't. KHTML and Konqueror are being developed independently from WebKit. WebKit itself has very little KHTML code left, anyways.

http://khtml-konqueror.blogspot.com

https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/kde-baseapps/repositor...

nailer2• 14 years ago

A few months before this email when Apple forked it and removed the QT dependencies.

terhechte• 14 years ago

I still remember watching the Keynote and expecting Gecko and then they had KHTML. I'd played around with Konqueror before, on various Linux distributions, and wasn't overwhelmed by its standards support (or quirks mode support, after all this was 2003). But Safari really enhanced it, and was so damn fast.

bad_user• 14 years ago

I remember using Konqueror and I always liked how fast it was. Indeed, many websites had problems when rendered with KHTML, but all that was needed was some polish.

ZeroGravitas3• 14 years ago

As an early user of Chimera/Camino, Phoenix/Firefox and Safari, the way I recall it was that KHTML was too good at standards, hence causing practical problems with actual web content which was built for IE. (A big part of Mozilla's energy at that time was in evangelizing websites to actually use standards and not block them for no reason, but they'd also done a lot of reverse engineering)

I also vaguely remember David Hyatt saying that they (edit: and by they I mean the Safari team that he'd moved from Mozilla to join) had taken some component from Gecko though I can't remember the details and his old Surfin Safari blog at http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt seems to have been superceded by the Webkit team's Surfin' Safari blog and it now just gives a broken redirect.

tephra• 14 years ago

Here's what the safari webpage looked like at the time if anyone is interested.

http://web.archive.org/web/20030108173656/http://www.apple.c...

thethimble• 14 years ago

Wow, Apple actually praising Google? 2003 seems like a long time ago.

taligent2• 14 years ago

I really miss the old Google. The purity of their vision and the frequent, crazy projects that came out of Google Labs. At one point it seemed like every good idea was coming from Google.

Ever since Larry Page's chat with Steve they really haven't been the same.

vvhn• 14 years ago

The CEO of Google was on Apple's Board of Directors till 2009. I'm guessing 2008 was the year which relationship soured.

hayksaakian• 14 years ago

OK I get it, a lot of work went into safari. Do we need weekly top posts evangelizing this?

Two next to each other at that?

rys• 14 years ago

If you know of better content that the community would like to read about instead, please submit it.

lessnonymous• 14 years ago

Please don't turn HN into Reddit and start karma whoring. This post belongs on the other one that made you go looking for this email.

jsmeaton• 14 years ago

It was posted as a comment in the other link also.

rmccue2• 14 years ago

Watching the keynote video, I see "CCS 1 and CCS 2" as two of the supported standards. Is this meant to be CSS, or am I missing a standard somewhere?

pretoriusB3• 14 years ago

No, there are meant to be CSS 1 and CSS 2.

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1/

http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/

"This document specifies level 1 of the Cascading Style Sheet mechanism (CSS1)."

Similarly for CSS2 and CSS3. How did you get the impression that it's all just CSS and it has no versions?

endianswap• 14 years ago

He was asking if CCS (note the two C's, not S's) was a typo or some unknown-to-him technology.

mcpoulet2• 14 years ago

Do you have a link to that video ? I didn't see that on the video I watched (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_ZNXQujgXw).

rmccue2• 14 years ago

It's just after the end of that video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13n98rSaYp4&t=66m47s

lobo_tuerto• 14 years ago

"Also, we'll be sending you another email soon which details our changes and additions to KHTML and KJS. I hope the detailed list in that email will help you understand what we've done a little better."

Interesting, anyone have a handle on this list?

Greetings from the Safari team at Apple Computer (2003)

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