7 ms·

Greetings from the Safari team at Apple Computer (2003)

165 points by thealphanerd 14y ago

niggler 14y ago
Wow, the original submission which linked to this article (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5041354 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5041354, http://donmelton.com/2013/01/10/safari-is-released-to-the-world/ http://donmelton.com/2013/01/10/safari-is-released-to-the-wo...) is #1 and this submission is #4
- damian2000 14y ago
  Its a great story ... and marks the beginning of WebKit.
  - makomk 14y 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.
- thealphanerd 14y ago
  There were quite a few links in that article. I found this email of particular interest and importance.
  - nailer 14y 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.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
worldsayshi 14y ago
Apple willingly releasing open source stuff feels rather counter to some of their other philosophy. (still)
- thealphanerd 14y 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.
- taligent 14y 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 http://www.opensource.apple.com It's really just a perception problem on your part.
  - archangel_one 14y 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?
    - neohaven 14y ago
      That said, it is rather simple to consider : as a general idea, the UI layer (Cocoa for OS X, CocoaTouch for iOS) and a few other things are closed. The rest is pretty open, as darwin in general is OSS.
      - ZeroGravitas 14y ago
        Not the lower "Darwin" layers of iOS, they've never released that.
        neohaven 14y ago
jheimark 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.
    - mistercow 14y ago
      Arguably, though, even if Gecko's code base were taken down to be smaller and easier to use than WebKit (and I have no idea how it actually compares today), it would be at a tremendous disadvantage because so many projects have incorporated WebKit. If I want to use WebKit in a new project today, I can find a ton of people online who have done so in the past and use their experience to get me through it. If I want to use Gecko in a new project, I will have a considerably smaller amount of outside experience to lean on.
  - yuhong 14y ago
    Yea, the Mariner cancellation meant that Netscape had no browser to compete in time for IE5, and Netscape 4 had many problems.
rwinn 14y ago
So when did KHTML become WebKit?
- Samuel_Michon 14y 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 http://khtml-konqueror.blogspot.com https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/kde-baseapps/repository/revisions/master/show/konqueror https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/kde-baseapps/repositor...
- nailer 14y ago
  A few months before this email when Apple forked it and removed the QT dependencies.
terhechte 14y 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 14y 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.
- ZeroGravitas 14y 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 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 14y 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.com/safari/ http://web.archive.org/web/20030108173656/http://www.apple.c...
- thethimble 14y ago
  Wow, Apple actually praising Google? 2003 seems like a long time ago.
  - taligent 14y 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.
    - beaumartinez 14y ago
      What "chat" was this? (Genuinely curious.)
      - rahoulb 14y ago
        http://www.edibleapple.com/2011/10/22/steve-jobs-advice-to-larry-page/ http://www.edibleapple.com/2011/10/22/steve-jobs-advice-to-l...
  - vvhn 14y ago
    The CEO of Google was on Apple's Board of Directors till 2009. I'm guessing 2008 was the year which relationship soured.
    - rahoulb 14y ago
      After Android changed from being Blackberry-like to being iPhone-like, Eric Schmidt stopped attending Apple board meetings where the iPhone was discussed due to conflicts of interest. I'm sure that this is where Steve Jobs' "Android is stolen" idea comes from.
hayksaakian 14y 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 14y ago
  If you know of better content that the community would like to read about instead, please submit it.
lessnonymous 14y 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 14y ago
  It was posted as a comment in the other link also.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
rmccue 14y 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?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- pretoriusB 14y ago
  No, there are meant to be CSS 1 and CSS 2. http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1/ http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1/ http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/ 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 14y ago
    He was asking if CCS (note the two C's, not S's) was a typo or some unknown-to-him technology.
    - pretoriusB 14y ago
      Ah, I see...
- mcpoulet 14y 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 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_ZNXQujgXw).
  - rmccue 14y ago
    It's just after the end of that video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13n98rSaYp4&t=66m47s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13n98rSaYp4&t=66m47s
    - 14y ago
lobo_tuerto 14y 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?

165 points by thealphanerd 14y ago

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

damian2000 14y ago
Its a great story ... and marks the beginning of WebKit.
- makomk 14y 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.
thealphanerd 14y ago
There were quite a few links in that article. I found this email of particular interest and importance.
- nailer 14y 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.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

worldsayshi 14y ago

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

thealphanerd 14y 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.
taligent 14y 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 http://www.opensource.apple.com It's really just a perception problem on your part.
- archangel_one 14y 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?
  - neohaven 14y ago
    That said, it is rather simple to consider : as a general idea, the UI layer (Cocoa for OS X, CocoaTouch for iOS) and a few other things are closed. The rest is pretty open, as darwin in general is OSS.
    - ZeroGravitas 14y ago
      Not the lower "Darwin" layers of iOS, they've never released that.
      - neohaven 14y ago

jheimark 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.
  - mistercow 14y ago
    Arguably, though, even if Gecko's code base were taken down to be smaller and easier to use than WebKit (and I have no idea how it actually compares today), it would be at a tremendous disadvantage because so many projects have incorporated WebKit. If I want to use WebKit in a new project today, I can find a ton of people online who have done so in the past and use their experience to get me through it. If I want to use Gecko in a new project, I will have a considerably smaller amount of outside experience to lean on.
- yuhong 14y ago
  Yea, the Mariner cancellation meant that Netscape had no browser to compete in time for IE5, and Netscape 4 had many problems.

rwinn 14y ago

So when did KHTML become WebKit?

Samuel_Michon 14y 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 http://khtml-konqueror.blogspot.com https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/kde-baseapps/repository/revisions/master/show/konqueror https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/kde-baseapps/repositor...
nailer 14y ago
A few months before this email when Apple forked it and removed the QT dependencies.

terhechte 14y 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 14y 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.
ZeroGravitas 14y 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 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 14y 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.com/safari/ http://web.archive.org/web/20030108173656/http://www.apple.c...

thethimble 14y ago
Wow, Apple actually praising Google? 2003 seems like a long time ago.
- taligent 14y 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.
  - beaumartinez 14y ago
    What "chat" was this? (Genuinely curious.)
    - rahoulb 14y ago
      http://www.edibleapple.com/2011/10/22/steve-jobs-advice-to-larry-page/ http://www.edibleapple.com/2011/10/22/steve-jobs-advice-to-l...
- vvhn 14y ago
  The CEO of Google was on Apple's Board of Directors till 2009. I'm guessing 2008 was the year which relationship soured.
  - rahoulb 14y ago
    After Android changed from being Blackberry-like to being iPhone-like, Eric Schmidt stopped attending Apple board meetings where the iPhone was discussed due to conflicts of interest. I'm sure that this is where Steve Jobs' "Android is stolen" idea comes from.

hayksaakian 14y 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 14y ago
If you know of better content that the community would like to read about instead, please submit it.

lessnonymous 14y 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 14y ago
It was posted as a comment in the other link also.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

rmccue 14y 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?

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
pretoriusB 14y ago
No, there are meant to be CSS 1 and CSS 2. http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1/ http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1/ http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/ 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 14y ago
  He was asking if CCS (note the two C's, not S's) was a typo or some unknown-to-him technology.
  - pretoriusB 14y ago
    Ah, I see...
mcpoulet 14y 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 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_ZNXQujgXw).
- rmccue 14y ago
  It's just after the end of that video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13n98rSaYp4&t=66m47s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13n98rSaYp4&t=66m47s
  - 14y ago

lobo_tuerto 14y 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?