8 ms·

Safari is released to the world (2013)

161 points by goranmoomin 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
scarface74 4y ago
Podcast featuring Melton discussing Safari https://www.imore.com/debug-11-don-melton-and-safari https://www.imore.com/debug-11-don-melton-and-safari
- doctor_eval 4y ago
  Those debug episodes are wonderful. Couldn’t recommend more highly.
incanus77 4y ago
From 2013, the tenth anniversary. I did watch this, and at the time was only a year into using Mac OS X coming from FreeBSD and Linux before that, where I used KDE. So when "KHTML" went up on the screen, I was right there with it.
dang 4y ago
Discussed at the time (of the article): Safari is released to the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5041354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5041354 - Jan 2013 (120 comments)
- saagarjha 4y ago
  At the time of the post, rather than at the time Safari was released ;)
  - dang 4y ago
    Ah yes. I've added my standard disclaimer for that ;) Thanks! https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22Discussed%20at%20the%20time%20of%20the%20article%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
echelon 4y ago
RIP Firefox. In the time since Safari's launch, Safari's WebKit has completely proliferated. Chrome and Blink came to the forefront and took even more marketshare. We live in a browser monoculture, dominated by the giants. Firefox is just a blip on the radar. Isn't this what Microsoft got sued by the Department of Justice over? Times are so different now. Mozilla barely ekes out an existence, and it's only thanks to the good graces of Google. Google's fear of antitrust action, that is. Mozilla nurtured Rust, and we should all be thankful for that. But Firefox doesn't look healthy, and it's such a shame. I'd welcome a world where Firefox was back at 30+%.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  Much of this outcome I believe traces back to Mozilla's decision to drop support for embedding Gecko in non-XUL apps. Outside of Safari, WebKit's popularity is largely owed to how easily it embeds — regardless of UI toolkit, platform, or language you're working with you can probably embed it, and so WebKit has shown up in countless embedded applications for over 15 years now. And while Blink isn't designed to embed as cleanly as WebKit does, Chromium can be pared down enough that it in itself can be used as a platform, which we've seen in Electron. While XULRunner was similar in spirit, it was cumbersome and clunky, which is why at one point one of the more popular Gecko browsers (Camino) was instead written with AppKit. Electron isn't exactly an elegant swan itself, but it's considerably more responsive and is arguably easier to write a passable application with. Embedding being killed also meant that there can only be one Gecko-based browser, because lack of embedding means being chained to XULRunner and prevents other Gecko browsers from being significantly different. So now if Firefox fails, Gecko is dead. If browsers like Camino still existed they could carry on the torch, but now those are gone. I know that embedding had serious technical issues but I think they were worth solving. By dropping embedding support they threw out the baby with the bathwater.
  - kevingadd 4y ago
    Having shipped a XULRunner based app before, I don't think there's any way Gecko could have been Electron. The design of the browser simply was not suited to it. (We put in pretty heroic effort to ship using it anyway, and it did work.)
AnonC 4y ago
I used to use Safari as an alternative browser along with Firefox on Windows. It seemed fast at that time. Then Apple stoped releasing Safari on Windows. I still use Safari on macOS. It seems to retain great performance with great battery life. Off topic: What would be cool is if Apple released Safari for Windows (again) and Linux. Ok, probably not for Linux, since Apple doesn’t work well with the desired licensing schemes and since Apple isn’t capable of working with the diversity on Linux to release an end user application. Safari on Windows and Linux may be probable (not even possible) only in an alternate universe, since Apple focuses on OS support for its applications in (roughly) this order: iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS/homeOS and miscellaneous (this includes Android and Windows). Anything outside iOS seems to get really smaller budgets, smaller teams and very little attention. Additionally, there is no money in Safari on other platforms, unless Apple does come up with the oft rumored Apple search engine and expands its advertising ambitions even more (considering how poorly Siri has been improving over time, any such search engine would be better not being developed or released at all).
- kevingadd 4y ago
  The odd thing is they've been maintaining a partial port of Safari for Windows this whole time - iTunes at least used to use it for its embedded webview. But aside from that use for it, Safari for Windows would have 100% been a play to try and keep Google from taking over the web, and I guess that didn't matter to them.
  - MBCook 4y ago
    I love Safari. It’s been my daily driver since it was released. I also installed it immediately on Windows. It was great for testing issues and seeing how things would render, but it was not performant. It seemed to do that same thing as iTunes and QT where it felt like Apple just ported their whole GUI stack on top of Windows. It looked and worked exactly like in a Mac. But that came with a big performance cost. Even as a big fan I couldn’t stand to use it as my main browser on my windows machine at work. I only used it for testing things. Otherwise I stuck to FireFox. I’ve always felt like Safari for windows was 100% about the HTML based “apps” before the App Store (so Windows users could develop them) and so companies could test their sites for iPhones without having to buy them when they were still niche/expensive. As iPhones rocketed to popularity, they didn’t seem to see it as necessary. The popularity of the iPhone alone was enough to force testing. And the iPod touch was there too as a cheaper testing device. I know it came out 4 years before the iPhone. Maybe it was laying the foundation? I just can’t see Apple truly wanting to be in the Windows browser market.
habitue 4y ago
[flagged]
xenospn 4y ago
What a wonderful post! I remember using Konqueror when it was first released, compiling it from source on my FreeBSD desktop. It was super slow and clunky (I had very little ram and a slow swap HDD), but it worked!
Conan_Kudo 4y ago
There's a sad irony that WebKit isn't really available to the KDE/Qt ecosystem anymore. The engine that came from KDE is no longer available for use in the KDE platform.
- tiffanyh 4y ago
  Can you explain why
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    Looking into it, I came across this: https://blogs.gnome.org/mcatanzaro/2022/11/04/stop-using-qtwebkit/ https://blogs.gnome.org/mcatanzaro/2022/11/04/stop-using-qtw... It looks like the Qt side of things doesn't get updated anymore. If you want to use webkit, there are still options, though. However, in my experience the open source webkit engine and Safari are very different. I don't know why you'd use webkit for anything if Blink and Gecko are available.
    - kitsunesoba 4y ago
      Open source WebKit on macOS is practically identical to Safari in behavior. Orion[0] for example ships its own build of WebKit, and it's as close to Safari as e.g. Edge is to Chrome. [0]: https://browser.kagi.com https://browser.kagi.com
    - epolanski 4y ago
      > However, in my experience the open source webkit engine and Safari are very different. This has not been my experience using Playwright which compiles webkit at every single new merge.
      - jeroenhd 4y ago
        My test for this was very simple: open https://html5test.com/ https://html5test.com/ and compare to the latest stable Safari release. The Webkit clients I could get working on my machine all lacked features Safari reportedly support, leading to a lower score than Safari. I don't know what's missing exactly, but there's clearly a distinction between the two, even if the core functionality is the same.
andirk 4y ago
iOS + iPhone + Safari is the new IE. Every other modern browser supports `MediaSource`, including iPad Safari [0], but not iPhone Safari. And there is not a peep about when it will be supported. [0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MediaSource https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MediaSource
- madeofpalk 4y ago
  Everyone's least favorite browser is the new IE.
  - sccxy 4y ago
    Are you even a developer? https://bugs.webkit.org/ https://bugs.webkit.org/ is full of bugs which are never fixed or will take years. You will never know where new iOS release breaks rendering engine again and new bugs appear out of nowhere. And it is almost impossible to debug them, because macOS safari is different than safari on iphone or ipad... And what about bug in webview in some app or firefox/chrome/edge on iOS...
    - madeofpalk 4y ago
      Yes! I've been a web developer for 16 years! I'm sure Chrome and Firefox issue trackers also have plenty of bugs which will never be fixed - that's just generally what happens with long-running software projects.
      - sccxy 4y ago
        At least in Chrome & Firefox you can update browser without big Android/Windows update... Safari needs big iOS update to fix bugs... It would be great if they atleast allow other browsers. So there would be alternative. Webkit bugs kill all browsers.
- lelandfe 4y ago
  iPhone Safari supports different things to iPad Safari? ...Good lord, why.
ec109685 4y ago
Fun comment (linking to the demo and musing about the innovation we'd see in 2023): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5041900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5041900 Yahoo and Google look pretty similar these days (clearly innovation moved to mobile apps): https://web.archive.org/web/20130701000055/http://www.yahoo.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130701000055/http://www.yahoo.... http://web.archive.org/web/20130308002617/http://www.google.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20130308002617/http://www.google.... Demo focused so much on bookmarks, and Jobs was showing off Flash during it!
shp0ngle 4y ago
> While at Apple, I also led the department developing the Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Messages and FaceTime apps on OS X—as well as Core Services, a set of frameworks familiar to anyone programming for the Mac. My teams did the original versions of some built-in iPad applications. And, of course, I was responsible for WebKit on iOS in addition to the desktop. Huh. I wish Apple still focused on these apps. Those apps used to be great at the time this guy was there. Nowadays it's all kind of lame. But yeah these days all the development on desktop seem to go on JS/HTML - partly thanks to WebKit (which was a basis for Chrome later, which was basis of Electron) - which makes the app kind of suck, but honestly the development side is much easier. And people actually use phones in 2023 more than desktop. So, whatever.
- nlitened 4y ago
  I use Mail, Reminders, Calendar, and Notes as my main productivity tools on both my Mac and iPhone. They are actually great!
  - johnwalkr 4y ago
    Drive, iTunes and photo sync, and keychain all work well on Windows these days too! Notes, reminders, and the rest of the web apps work well enough too. A windows/gaming pc plus a MacBook is a pretty good combination now.
  - narrowtux 4y ago
    Honestly I wish there were mail, calendar and contact apps for other systems, as good as apples with solid webdav/caldav support. Thunderbird is kind of lacking in all aspects.
- Veen 4y ago
  They do focus on them. Reminders has had loads of updates in recent years: it's actually a pretty good todo app these days. Mail is updated every year with new features. Messages is key to Apple's services push, and get a massive amount of attention. Calendar and contacts remain a bit crap though.
shedside 4y ago
The YouTube link in the article is dead now, but here's another video of the full presentation: https://youtu.be/gPyrzvI7Mlc?t=3240 https://youtu.be/gPyrzvI7Mlc?t=3240 It's fascinating to see just how much new stuff was unveiled.
- EricE 4y ago
  Thank you! I was searching for this myself but hadn't stumbled across it.
nailer 4y ago
Linux lost the desktop. But KHTML - basis for Chrome, Safari and Edge - won the web browser for open source.
chazeon 4y ago
Ken Kocienda, “the first Safari engineer”, has a book called Creative Selection [1] released a few years ago. It has a fascinating behind the scene story on how Safari was developed and how KHTML was chosen. I don’t like the analogous story on sports though. [1]: http://creativeselection.io/ http://creativeselection.io/
sgerenser 4y ago
Contemporaneous daring fireball post: https://daringfireball.net/2003/01/safari https://daringfireball.net/2003/01/safari I love how at the time he thought that lacking tabbed browsing was no big deal, since its a broken paradigm anyway. Surely Apple has something better than tabs up their sleeve!
wintermutestwin 4y ago
I use Safari on Mac for a handful of financial websites where I log in with very complex passwords so that I can use the fingerprint reader. Every time I use it, I am disgusted with its klunky interface (for example, the vertical tab solution is hilariously broken). I can't believe that a $2t company is so careless with their apps. Firefox is a huge PITA to set up right, but once you manage to get it set up with Sidebery, MUC, etc, it works well.

161 points by goranmoomin 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Podcast featuring Melton discussing Safari https://www.imore.com/debug-11-don-melton-and-safari https://www.imore.com/debug-11-don-melton-and-safari

doctor_eval 4y ago
Those debug episodes are wonderful. Couldn’t recommend more highly.

incanus77 4y ago

From 2013, the tenth anniversary. I did watch this, and at the time was only a year into using Mac OS X coming from FreeBSD and Linux before that, where I used KDE. So when "KHTML" went up on the screen, I was right there with it.

dang 4y ago

Discussed at the time (of the article): Safari is released to the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5041354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5041354 - Jan 2013 (120 comments)

saagarjha 4y ago
At the time of the post, rather than at the time Safari was released ;)
- dang 4y ago
  Ah yes. I've added my standard disclaimer for that ;) Thanks! https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22Discussed%20at%20the%20time%20of%20the%20article%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

echelon 4y ago

RIP Firefox. In the time since Safari's launch, Safari's WebKit has completely proliferated. Chrome and Blink came to the forefront and took even more marketshare. We live in a browser monoculture, dominated by the giants. Firefox is just a blip on the radar. Isn't this what Microsoft got sued by the Department of Justice over? Times are so different now. Mozilla barely ekes out an existence, and it's only thanks to the good graces of Google. Google's fear of antitrust action, that is. Mozilla nurtured Rust, and we should all be thankful for that. But Firefox doesn't look healthy, and it's such a shame. I'd welcome a world where Firefox was back at 30+%.

kitsunesoba 4y ago
Much of this outcome I believe traces back to Mozilla's decision to drop support for embedding Gecko in non-XUL apps. Outside of Safari, WebKit's popularity is largely owed to how easily it embeds — regardless of UI toolkit, platform, or language you're working with you can probably embed it, and so WebKit has shown up in countless embedded applications for over 15 years now. And while Blink isn't designed to embed as cleanly as WebKit does, Chromium can be pared down enough that it in itself can be used as a platform, which we've seen in Electron. While XULRunner was similar in spirit, it was cumbersome and clunky, which is why at one point one of the more popular Gecko browsers (Camino) was instead written with AppKit. Electron isn't exactly an elegant swan itself, but it's considerably more responsive and is arguably easier to write a passable application with. Embedding being killed also meant that there can only be one Gecko-based browser, because lack of embedding means being chained to XULRunner and prevents other Gecko browsers from being significantly different. So now if Firefox fails, Gecko is dead. If browsers like Camino still existed they could carry on the torch, but now those are gone. I know that embedding had serious technical issues but I think they were worth solving. By dropping embedding support they threw out the baby with the bathwater.
- kevingadd 4y ago
  Having shipped a XULRunner based app before, I don't think there's any way Gecko could have been Electron. The design of the browser simply was not suited to it. (We put in pretty heroic effort to ship using it anyway, and it did work.)

AnonC 4y ago

I used to use Safari as an alternative browser along with Firefox on Windows. It seemed fast at that time. Then Apple stoped releasing Safari on Windows. I still use Safari on macOS. It seems to retain great performance with great battery life. Off topic: What would be cool is if Apple released Safari for Windows (again) and Linux. Ok, probably not for Linux, since Apple doesn’t work well with the desired licensing schemes and since Apple isn’t capable of working with the diversity on Linux to release an end user application. Safari on Windows and Linux may be probable (not even possible) only in an alternate universe, since Apple focuses on OS support for its applications in (roughly) this order: iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS/homeOS and miscellaneous (this includes Android and Windows). Anything outside iOS seems to get really smaller budgets, smaller teams and very little attention. Additionally, there is no money in Safari on other platforms, unless Apple does come up with the oft rumored Apple search engine and expands its advertising ambitions even more (considering how poorly Siri has been improving over time, any such search engine would be better not being developed or released at all).

kevingadd 4y ago
The odd thing is they've been maintaining a partial port of Safari for Windows this whole time - iTunes at least used to use it for its embedded webview. But aside from that use for it, Safari for Windows would have 100% been a play to try and keep Google from taking over the web, and I guess that didn't matter to them.
- MBCook 4y ago
  I love Safari. It’s been my daily driver since it was released. I also installed it immediately on Windows. It was great for testing issues and seeing how things would render, but it was not performant. It seemed to do that same thing as iTunes and QT where it felt like Apple just ported their whole GUI stack on top of Windows. It looked and worked exactly like in a Mac. But that came with a big performance cost. Even as a big fan I couldn’t stand to use it as my main browser on my windows machine at work. I only used it for testing things. Otherwise I stuck to FireFox. I’ve always felt like Safari for windows was 100% about the HTML based “apps” before the App Store (so Windows users could develop them) and so companies could test their sites for iPhones without having to buy them when they were still niche/expensive. As iPhones rocketed to popularity, they didn’t seem to see it as necessary. The popularity of the iPhone alone was enough to force testing. And the iPod touch was there too as a cheaper testing device. I know it came out 4 years before the iPhone. Maybe it was laying the foundation? I just can’t see Apple truly wanting to be in the Windows browser market.

habitue 4y ago

[flagged]

xenospn 4y ago

What a wonderful post! I remember using Konqueror when it was first released, compiling it from source on my FreeBSD desktop. It was super slow and clunky (I had very little ram and a slow swap HDD), but it worked!

Conan_Kudo 4y ago

There's a sad irony that WebKit isn't really available to the KDE/Qt ecosystem anymore. The engine that came from KDE is no longer available for use in the KDE platform.

tiffanyh 4y ago
Can you explain why
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  Looking into it, I came across this: https://blogs.gnome.org/mcatanzaro/2022/11/04/stop-using-qtwebkit/ https://blogs.gnome.org/mcatanzaro/2022/11/04/stop-using-qtw... It looks like the Qt side of things doesn't get updated anymore. If you want to use webkit, there are still options, though. However, in my experience the open source webkit engine and Safari are very different. I don't know why you'd use webkit for anything if Blink and Gecko are available.
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    Open source WebKit on macOS is practically identical to Safari in behavior. Orion[0] for example ships its own build of WebKit, and it's as close to Safari as e.g. Edge is to Chrome. [0]: https://browser.kagi.com https://browser.kagi.com
  - epolanski 4y ago
    > However, in my experience the open source webkit engine and Safari are very different. This has not been my experience using Playwright which compiles webkit at every single new merge.
    - jeroenhd 4y ago
      My test for this was very simple: open https://html5test.com/ https://html5test.com/ and compare to the latest stable Safari release. The Webkit clients I could get working on my machine all lacked features Safari reportedly support, leading to a lower score than Safari. I don't know what's missing exactly, but there's clearly a distinction between the two, even if the core functionality is the same.

andirk 4y ago

iOS + iPhone + Safari is the new IE. Every other modern browser supports `MediaSource`, including iPad Safari [0], but not iPhone Safari. And there is not a peep about when it will be supported. [0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MediaSource https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MediaSource

madeofpalk 4y ago
Everyone's least favorite browser is the new IE.
- sccxy 4y ago
  Are you even a developer? https://bugs.webkit.org/ https://bugs.webkit.org/ is full of bugs which are never fixed or will take years. You will never know where new iOS release breaks rendering engine again and new bugs appear out of nowhere. And it is almost impossible to debug them, because macOS safari is different than safari on iphone or ipad... And what about bug in webview in some app or firefox/chrome/edge on iOS...
  - madeofpalk 4y ago
    Yes! I've been a web developer for 16 years! I'm sure Chrome and Firefox issue trackers also have plenty of bugs which will never be fixed - that's just generally what happens with long-running software projects.
    - sccxy 4y ago
      At least in Chrome & Firefox you can update browser without big Android/Windows update... Safari needs big iOS update to fix bugs... It would be great if they atleast allow other browsers. So there would be alternative. Webkit bugs kill all browsers.
lelandfe 4y ago
iPhone Safari supports different things to iPad Safari? ...Good lord, why.

ec109685 4y ago

Fun comment (linking to the demo and musing about the innovation we'd see in 2023): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5041900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5041900 Yahoo and Google look pretty similar these days (clearly innovation moved to mobile apps): https://web.archive.org/web/20130701000055/http://www.yahoo.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130701000055/http://www.yahoo.... http://web.archive.org/web/20130308002617/http://www.google.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20130308002617/http://www.google.... Demo focused so much on bookmarks, and Jobs was showing off Flash during it!

shp0ngle 4y ago

> While at Apple, I also led the department developing the Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Messages and FaceTime apps on OS X—as well as Core Services, a set of frameworks familiar to anyone programming for the Mac. My teams did the original versions of some built-in iPad applications. And, of course, I was responsible for WebKit on iOS in addition to the desktop. Huh. I wish Apple still focused on these apps. Those apps used to be great at the time this guy was there. Nowadays it's all kind of lame. But yeah these days all the development on desktop seem to go on JS/HTML - partly thanks to WebKit (which was a basis for Chrome later, which was basis of Electron) - which makes the app kind of suck, but honestly the development side is much easier. And people actually use phones in 2023 more than desktop. So, whatever.

nlitened 4y ago
I use Mail, Reminders, Calendar, and Notes as my main productivity tools on both my Mac and iPhone. They are actually great!
- johnwalkr 4y ago
  Drive, iTunes and photo sync, and keychain all work well on Windows these days too! Notes, reminders, and the rest of the web apps work well enough too. A windows/gaming pc plus a MacBook is a pretty good combination now.
- narrowtux 4y ago
  Honestly I wish there were mail, calendar and contact apps for other systems, as good as apples with solid webdav/caldav support. Thunderbird is kind of lacking in all aspects.
Veen 4y ago
They do focus on them. Reminders has had loads of updates in recent years: it's actually a pretty good todo app these days. Mail is updated every year with new features. Messages is key to Apple's services push, and get a massive amount of attention. Calendar and contacts remain a bit crap though.

shedside 4y ago

The YouTube link in the article is dead now, but here's another video of the full presentation: https://youtu.be/gPyrzvI7Mlc?t=3240 https://youtu.be/gPyrzvI7Mlc?t=3240 It's fascinating to see just how much new stuff was unveiled.

EricE 4y ago
Thank you! I was searching for this myself but hadn't stumbled across it.

nailer 4y ago

Linux lost the desktop. But KHTML - basis for Chrome, Safari and Edge - won the web browser for open source.

chazeon 4y ago

Ken Kocienda, “the first Safari engineer”, has a book called Creative Selection [1] released a few years ago. It has a fascinating behind the scene story on how Safari was developed and how KHTML was chosen. I don’t like the analogous story on sports though. [1]: http://creativeselection.io/ http://creativeselection.io/

sgerenser 4y ago

Contemporaneous daring fireball post: https://daringfireball.net/2003/01/safari https://daringfireball.net/2003/01/safari I love how at the time he thought that lacking tabbed browsing was no big deal, since its a broken paradigm anyway. Surely Apple has something better than tabs up their sleeve!

wintermutestwin 4y ago

I use Safari on Mac for a handful of financial websites where I log in with very complex passwords so that I can use the fingerprint reader. Every time I use it, I am disgusted with its klunky interface (for example, the vertical tab solution is hilariously broken). I can't believe that a $2t company is so careless with their apps. Firefox is a huge PITA to set up right, but once you manage to get it set up with Sidebery, MUC, etc, it works well.