Twenty five years ago today I started the #Safari and #WebKit projects at #Apple Computer.
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@lisamelton what were the reasons back then to use KDE's KHTML as the base? Were there no other open alternatives around yet? My timeline might be skewed, but I believe Netscape was already open source at this point.
Did it have some outstanding qualities that made it an obvious choice?
Was it licensing-wise the easier choice?@eliasp I've spoken and written about this numerous times. And the complete answer is too long for a toot.
The TL;DR is that Mozilla code (at the time) was bloated and slow. Licensing Microsoft Internet Explorer wasn't politically viable. Licensing other browsers wasn't feasible or the technology sucked for various reasons, just like Explorer.
It was truly a choice between basing our effort on KHTML and KJS or writing a browser from scratch. And I knew better than to attempt the latter.
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@lisamelton Now if we can just re-instil the notion of any changes must make the app faster…
Thanks again, for all the amazing work.
@octothorpe Indeed! And you are very welcome.
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@eliasp I've spoken and written about this numerous times. And the complete answer is too long for a toot.
The TL;DR is that Mozilla code (at the time) was bloated and slow. Licensing Microsoft Internet Explorer wasn't politically viable. Licensing other browsers wasn't feasible or the technology sucked for various reasons, just like Explorer.
It was truly a choice between basing our effort on KHTML and KJS or writing a browser from scratch. And I knew better than to attempt the latter.
@eliasp Also, the KHTML and KJS code did not suck. It was rather incomplete and raw, but it was well-written and something I knew could be a project my browser-inexperienced team could learn on.
It wasn't until I lured David Hyatt away from Mozilla, after he started Firefox, that we really began to change KHTML and KJS.
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@TheEddieShow Guilty as charged!
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@eliasp I've spoken and written about this numerous times. And the complete answer is too long for a toot.
The TL;DR is that Mozilla code (at the time) was bloated and slow. Licensing Microsoft Internet Explorer wasn't politically viable. Licensing other browsers wasn't feasible or the technology sucked for various reasons, just like Explorer.
It was truly a choice between basing our effort on KHTML and KJS or writing a browser from scratch. And I knew better than to attempt the latter.
We even have a couple of examples. The clean room browser engines that have been popping up like Arc and Servo have been going for years and years and aren't fully compliant engines yet. Standards compat is hard to catch up to esp since they're moving forward at the same time.
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@jeridansky Awwww, thank you so much!
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Twenty five years ago today I started the #Safari and #WebKit projects at #Apple Computer.
Which means Safari is now old enough to rent itself a car. But let's not speculate about my age.
I'm still sad I can't use Safari on my Windows PC. Alas, I lost the battle to keep it there. But at least WebKit's DNA seeded or influenced most browsers we use today.
And I'm proud of that impact. Along with the wonderful team I built who made it all happen. Here's to another 25, friends.
Cheers.
@lisamelton All the people say Safari sucks everytime I mention that I'm using Safari. I think it's one of the best browsers right now
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We even have a couple of examples. The clean room browser engines that have been popping up like Arc and Servo have been going for years and years and aren't fully compliant engines yet. Standards compat is hard to catch up to esp since they're moving forward at the same time.
@bigolewannabe Yes, but the people who hired me at Apple wanted a Web browser and Web library in one year.
I knew that was impossible, but I figured they wouldn't fire me if I took 18 months. Which is exactly how long it did take before we unveiled the public Beta in January of 2003.
Only a fool would write everything from scratch with pressure like that. And I was no fool.
That's not to disparage the work by the Arc and Servo teams, but they didn't have the constraints that I did.
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Twenty five years ago today I started the #Safari and #WebKit projects at #Apple Computer.
Which means Safari is now old enough to rent itself a car. But let's not speculate about my age.
I'm still sad I can't use Safari on my Windows PC. Alas, I lost the battle to keep it there. But at least WebKit's DNA seeded or influenced most browsers we use today.
And I'm proud of that impact. Along with the wonderful team I built who made it all happen. Here's to another 25, friends.
Cheers.
@lisamelton I didn’t know there was a Safari for windows
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@lisamelton All the people say Safari sucks everytime I mention that I'm using Safari. I think it's one of the best browsers right now
@d4v Thank you so much for being such a loyal defender of Safari!
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Twenty five years ago today I started the #Safari and #WebKit projects at #Apple Computer.
Which means Safari is now old enough to rent itself a car. But let's not speculate about my age.
I'm still sad I can't use Safari on my Windows PC. Alas, I lost the battle to keep it there. But at least WebKit's DNA seeded or influenced most browsers we use today.
And I'm proud of that impact. Along with the wonderful team I built who made it all happen. Here's to another 25, friends.
Cheers.
Congrats.
I had some gripes with Safari in the '10s. It always seemed to blocking powerful modern progressive web apps somewhere every time you tried. Very limited localstorage implementation, difficult manifest handling over online states, limited SVG support, very, very, very late support of webRTC.
I always had the nagging suspicion this was by design to keep people paying the app store tax.
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@bigolewannabe Yes, but the people who hired me at Apple wanted a Web browser and Web library in one year.
I knew that was impossible, but I figured they wouldn't fire me if I took 18 months. Which is exactly how long it did take before we unveiled the public Beta in January of 2003.
Only a fool would write everything from scratch with pressure like that. And I was no fool.
That's not to disparage the work by the Arc and Servo teams, but they didn't have the constraints that I did.
@lisamelton @bigolewannabe s/2023/2003/
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@lisamelton I didn’t know there was a Safari for windows
@cubeofcheese It was only actively developed for a few years starting in 2007.
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@bigolewannabe Yes, but the people who hired me at Apple wanted a Web browser and Web library in one year.
I knew that was impossible, but I figured they wouldn't fire me if I took 18 months. Which is exactly how long it did take before we unveiled the public Beta in January of 2003.
Only a fool would write everything from scratch with pressure like that. And I was no fool.
That's not to disparage the work by the Arc and Servo teams, but they didn't have the constraints that I did.
That exactly what I meant and yes. I'm not disparaging those teams either. Browsers engines are HARD. Doing them right takes a long time. Doing them well takes even longer. The edge cases and have edge cases.
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Twenty five years ago today I started the #Safari and #WebKit projects at #Apple Computer.
Which means Safari is now old enough to rent itself a car. But let's not speculate about my age.
I'm still sad I can't use Safari on my Windows PC. Alas, I lost the battle to keep it there. But at least WebKit's DNA seeded or influenced most browsers we use today.
And I'm proud of that impact. Along with the wonderful team I built who made it all happen. Here's to another 25, friends.
Cheers.
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@lisamelton @bigolewannabe s/2023/2003/
@eliasp Thanks. Fixed.
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Twenty five years ago today I started the #Safari and #WebKit projects at #Apple Computer.
Which means Safari is now old enough to rent itself a car. But let's not speculate about my age.
I'm still sad I can't use Safari on my Windows PC. Alas, I lost the battle to keep it there. But at least WebKit's DNA seeded or influenced most browsers we use today.
And I'm proud of that impact. Along with the wonderful team I built who made it all happen. Here's to another 25, friends.
Cheers.
@lisamelton thank you for you service 🫂
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That exactly what I meant and yes. I'm not disparaging those teams either. Browsers engines are HARD. Doing them right takes a long time. Doing them well takes even longer. The edge cases and have edge cases.
@bigolewannabe LOL! Indeed.
I used to quote Ernie Hudson's line as Winston Zeddemore in Ghostbusters when detailing some of the egregious HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Web server behavior I've encountered from working on Netscape Navigator in the 90s and then Safari:
"I've seen shit that'll turn you white."
And, yeah, it's just that scary.
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@lisamelton @bigolewannabe s/2023/2003/
@eliasp @lisamelton @bigolewannabe That long ago already…? Man I remember the excitement on @slashdot back when this was announced. Big vendors adopting open source was not yet common, at all. It was a big deal.
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@jeridansky @lisamelton Ditto!
