
Keeping Safari a secret - ryannielsen
http://donmelton.com/2013/01/03/keeping-safari-a-secret/
======
duopixel
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 done?

I remember Apple stating that Konqueror's code was much more leaner, faster
and modern. I've always wondered if the birth of Safari was an early sign that
Apple was interested in developing the pieces missing for an internet device.
Safari seemed like a godsend foresight from Apple when they released the
iPhone, but I can't help wonder if it was planned this way all along.

~~~
donmelton
I would love to claim the foresight of planning for the iPhone all along.
Alas, that was not the case. :) For any of us.

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. :)

You have to remember that Mac OS X itself was smaller in those days. Not iOS
small, but considerably smaller that it is now.

After the initial success of Mac Safari, there was a time when I was second-
guessed by some for choosing KHTML and KJS as the basis for WebKit. When we
decided to do the iPhone, I was suddenly a genius again. :)

That's just the way it works in the real world.

~~~
btipling
That's twice you mentioned 'being shot' for failure. Sounds like a real
culture of fear. I get the excitement for a chance to innovate the future of
computing, but I sometimes get a sense of real Stockholm Syndrome from people
at Apple. I personally don't want to work at a place where people are so
afraid of failure. Look at Forstall's recent exit. All those years changing
the world through computing, and at the end he gets a disgraceful boot out the
door.

You can change the world from a growing startup without having to fear for
your career at every turn. You can have fun without being afraid. Imagine
that!

~~~
donmelton
That's just me being facetious. Don't read that much into it.

Apple was an excellent place to work and I had a great relationship with
Scott, Bertrand, Avie and Steve. Nobody was going to shoot me. AFAIK. :)

~~~
bdash
It's the underlings you have to watch out for.

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

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

~~~
donmelton
Thank you. That was my whole reason for writing it. :)

~~~
bitcartel
What are your thoughts on the present and future for Safari? It appears Safari
for Windows is all but dead, with no mention of it on Apple's website.
Meanwhile Chrome's adoption has been stellar.
<http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp>

~~~
donmelton
I'm not going to comment on the present and future of Safari and WebKit. I'm
retired. I have no business doing that. And it would disrespect the fine
people at Apple -- my friends -- who are still working on both.

~~~
robmcm
You are lucky no one changed their system clock for testing before launch!

Then again it doesn't seem Apple do that very often, _cough_ Do not disturb
_cough_ ;)

------
sxp
>Back around 1990, some forward-thinking IT person secured for Apple an entire
Class A network of IP addresses.

I found that fact to be the most interesting part of the article. The list of
other Class A holders is also interesting:
<http://www.aturtschi.com/whois/neta1.html>

~~~
davvid
_Back around 1990, some forward-thinking IT person secured for Apple an entire
Class A network of IP addresses._

Pixar has a large block too... I wonder if Steve had something to do with it?

------
mbreckon
Don, would you be willing to share a bit in future posts about how you grew
the team, how you organised yourselves and how that changed over the course of
the project? Also, what thought process did you go through in the decision of
how much to include in V1.0 vs leave to later releases? As a team lead/product
manager I'm always interested in hearing other people's experiences, and your
experience and writing style put you in a better place than many to do that.
It is the thought processes and the dynamics of interacting with others in an
organisation that make software development stories interesting.

------
laurent123456
> We couldn’t ship with the real Safari user agent string disabled, but we
> came up with the next best thing — automatically enabling it after a certain
> date.

Does that mean that if you set the date of your computer back before 2003, the
user agent will become Internet Explorer?

~~~
donmelton
If you were able to run a copy of Safari version 48, it would probably look
like a Gecko-based browser before this date.

~~~
bdash
v38. You'd not see it with v48.

~~~
donmelton
My mistake. We turned it off in the final release?

~~~
bdash
Yup!

------
nsp
Does anyone know why Apple stopped doing this(or stopped doing it as
thoroughly)? With the possible exception of the original, sites have
consistently reported visits from iOS/iPhone:iPad user agents (and claimed
that the ip originated within apple) well before launch. Recent example:
[http://thenextweb.com/apple/2013/01/01/developers-begin-
seei...](http://thenextweb.com/apple/2013/01/01/developers-begin-seeing-new-
apple-iphone-hardware-and-ios-7-in-usage-logs/)

~~~
markrages
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.

~~~
robmcm
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

~~~
Tloewald
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.

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

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

~~~
petemc_
I take it you didn't read it.

------
georgemcbay
"Which explains why the Safari user agent string has so much extra information
in it, e.g. KHTML, like Gecko — the names of other browser engines."

Wasn't Safari/WebKit largely based on KHTML in the beginning? This doesn't say
it wasn't, but seems to imply that there was a separation of the two that was
more complete than it really was.

I realize the OP is in a better position than I to know exactly what the
reasoning here was, but it seems like reporting yourself as KHTML when you are
largely based on the KHTML rendering engine would just be a sensible and
practical thing to do outside of all this cloak and dagger stuff.

(Granted, I doubt there were very many websites, if any at all, that gave a
rat's ass about special cases for KHTML compatibility).

~~~
oofabz
At the time, Microsoft's hegemony over the web browser market was at its peak.
Firefox was the only real competitor. If web pages checked the user agent,
they probably only accounted for these two browsers. Anything else fell back
to legacy behavior, disabling DHTML (later called Web 2.0). This made Gmail
suck.

KHTML had almost no market share - it only ran on KDE, and most KDE users used
Firefox. Nothing recognized its user agent string, so reporting "KHTML" would
have been as ineffectual as reporting "Safari" or "WebKit".

~~~
georgemcbay
"At the time, Microsoft's hegemony over the web browser market was at its
peak. Firefox was the only real competitor."

Actually at the time this is referencing Firefox didn't exist (Gecko did, but
Firefox didn't). I'm well aware of the history and why browsers trick out
their user agents. If you want to go one level deeper, look no further than
the fact that IE still pretends to be Mozilla because of the early days when
they were late to the party.

------
cpeterso
If they were worried about server admins correlating Apple's IP addresses with
a new User-Agent string, the team could have VPN'd to a non-Apple network to
access the web.

~~~
laurent123456
I guess they were worried both about having recognizable IP addresses AND
having the name of their new browser appear in logs all around the world.

The user agent was something like "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X;
sv-se) AppleWebKit/85.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/85.5", which people would
have quickly correlated to Apple, not matter what IP it came from.

~~~
donmelton
The string was originally just contained "WebKit." When it became
"AppleWebKit" in mid-December (as I recall) then, yes, it was more likely to
be discovered. But I felt that a 17.x.x.x address would be the clincher and
the secret would be out.

------
jiggy2011
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?

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

------
jagermo
This seems like an insane waste of resources just to keep a secret.

Did this get you in any programming troubles in the long term?

------
Raz0rblade
must have been easier to use an ip filter and base the identifier on ip...
duh..

~~~
to3m
A device behind a router might be unable to reliably determine its outward-
facing IP.

------
JohnFromBuffalo
This still makes me think that Ninjas work at Apple. How other can they evade
such a public part of the interwebs? <http://www.askaninja.com/> I guess.

~~~
astrange
What a nicely transparent spam post.

