
Safari is released to the world - olivercameron
http://donmelton.com/2013/01/10/safari-is-released-to-the-world/
======
jpxxx
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
Speaking of which, how is the KHTML (not webkit) code now?

~~~
rogerbinns
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.

~~~
wheels
I can't comment on the state of things today, but I was active an active KDE
core developer at the time from that original message to the time of the
Zack's blog post (and I'm friends with both Dirk and Zack):

There was a huge amount of excitement at the announcement that Safari would be
using KHTML. At that time, it was almost a given that the OSS rendering engine
was Gecko. KHTML was KDE's _little engine that could_. But nobody ever
expected it to be picked up by other folks. One of the original parts of the
KHTML-to-OS X port was KWQ (pronounced, "quack") that abstracted out the KDE
API portions that were used in KHTML.

Folks were pretty ecstatic at first. It seemed very validating.

But that changed quickly. As Zack's post indicates, WebKit became a thing of
unmergable code-drops. Even inside of the KDE community there became a split
between the KHTML purists and the WebKit faction. They'd previously more or
less all been KHTML developers, but post-WebKit there was something of a
pragmatists vs. idealists split. Zack fell on the latter side of that (for
understandable reasons: there was an existing community project, with its own
set of values, and that was hijacked to a large extent by WebKit).

A few years later WebKit transformed itself into a more or less valid open
source project (see webkit.org), but that didn't close the rift in the KDE
community between the two, at that point rather divergent, rendering engines.
There's still some remaining melancholy that stems from that initial hope and
what could have potentially been, but wasn't.

It's hard to argue that WebKit being open source has been a bad thing -- in
fact, I don't believe that in the slightest. But I can also understand that
it's pretty head-turning to have have a project transform in that way,
especially for the original contributors (though, it should be noted, the
original author of KHTML, who wasn't really active at the time of the
transition, did eventually fall into the WebKit camp).

Final note: this is just my somewhat fractured recollection of things from
being in KDE community. My contributions to KHTML / WebKit were very minor
(the original spellchecking support) so this may not jive completely with the
folks that were closer.

~~~
bdash
This matches my recollection of things as someone that followed WebKit from
shortly after Safari was announced, and became actively involved when the open
source project proper started up in 2005.

------
SeoxyS
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
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&...](http://lists.kde.org/?l=kfm-
devel&m=104205781123001&w=2)

------
smackfu
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.

~~~
podperson
<http://folklore.org/index.py>

~~~
joezydeco
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.

~~~
DanBC
People may have heard of "Rock Family Trees" - you look at the members of
bands and trace backwards (and forwards) to see all the other bands involved.

Here's an example for Crosby Stills & Nash
(<http://familyofrock.com/browse/details/csny.html>) and one for Eric Clapton
(<http://familyofrock.com/browse/details/clapton.html>)

It could be interesting to do a "Start up family trees" to see the flow of
people throughout the industry.

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

Strongly agree.

~~~
joezydeco
Those family trees are fun. In a different life when I worked in one
particular small, tight-knit industry I took a large whiteboard and traced
each employee outward. That was a lot of fun.

I suspect in the case of Apple, however, that there would be a lot of circular
loops many times over. =)

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

------
dave1010uk
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
You must be kidding.

~~~
ConstantineXVI
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.

~~~
podperson
You notably left out Adobe who use it for Adobe AIR.

~~~
ConstantineXVI
Adobe is more or less neutral, though (they just want you to buy their tools).
Apple, Nokia, RIM, Samsung, etc. all would very much like the others to cease
existing; yet they're all contributing to a project that keeps each other on a
level playing field (in the context of HTML/JS engines, anyway).

~~~
podperson
I think the point is that Apple didn't treat Safari/Webkit as being a
competitive advantage so much as nullifying a competitive disadvantage -- it
was a defensive play, not an offensive play. (A nice analogy is Android, which
Google developed out of fear they would miss out on the mobile market rather
than out of any desire to "own" the mobile market. Google didn't want Apple or
anyone else to own its destiny, just as Apple didn't want Microsoft to own its
destiny.)

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

------
nodesocket
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?

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

------
michael_miller
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!

~~~
ricardobeat
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...](https://www.webkit.org/blog/114/webcore-rendering-i-the-basics/)

------
tvwonline
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
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
It's also much less useful with tabbed browsing.

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

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

~~~
diminish
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.

~~~
jmreid
Here's a great story from Cabel at Panic about how Apple approached them to
purchase Panic so they could turn Audion into iTunes. Instead, they went with
SoundJam:

<http://panic.com/extras/audionstory/>

~~~
watmough
Great story, and I'm a huge fan of Coda, that does a little of everything
pretty well.

------
brown9-2
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?

~~~
SG-
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.

------
albertzeyer
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.

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

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

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

~~~
podperson
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.

~~~
sarvinc
"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?

~~~
ZeroGravitas
As mentioned in the story Dave Hyatt was the main guy behind Chimera, (a
streamlined platform native browser using the gecko renderer but ditching
mail, composer etc. from Mozilla Suite) and with Blake Ross, behind Phoenix,
which became Firefox (a streamlined platform native browser using the gecko
renderer but ditching mail, composer etc. from the Mozilla Suite).

Technically, they were both faking the platform native element to some degree,
but they were at least trying to fit in with their respective target
platform(s).

~~~
sarvinc
Yeah, I just found it in the story! I was an early user of Pheonix but never
bothered to learn the history behind the browser.

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

------
bulletmagnet
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
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.

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

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

------
kawsper
> 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.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
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>

------
meerita
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.

------
ambiguator
Don Melton, welcome to my bookmark folder.

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

~~~
nossralf
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>

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

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

------
abdophoto
Man, what an incredible story. Thanks Don Melton!

------
jlkinsel
awesome ending :)

------
IheartApplesDix
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.

------
shellehs
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
Chrome uses WebKit...

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

~~~
veemjeem
right, so what mcot2 is saying is that you're using most of safari anyway.
safari was just a thin shell on top of webkit. I'm sure apple spent most of
it's time improving webkit and not much time making the UI shell around it.

------
thejosh
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.

~~~
mxxx
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
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.

~~~
donmelton
Neither, really. It's mostly because I retired.

~~~
Danieru
So I'm curious. As a young programmer with 1.5 years before entering the
workforce I have to wonder what you plan to do. From my super young and
inexperienced perspective retirement will just mean having more control over
my programming. Is programming still super fun and adicting?

So; what do you plan to do? A relaxed retirement? Occasional contracting? A
startup? Open source? Quiting programming forever and travelling? Something a
lot more reasonable than this false dichotomy?

~~~
kanamekun
From his website: "Hello, I'm Don Melton, probably best known as the guy who
started the Safari and WebKit projects at Apple. These days I'm just an
aspiring writer and a recovering programmer."

<http://donmelton.com/about/>

