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Apple Safari marks its 10th birthday as part of a much wider web
While most of us think of the web browser landscape as a fierce battle between Google, Microsoft and Mozilla, the situation was very different a decade ago. Internet Explorer still dominated the market, Firefox's precursor Phoenix was months away and Chrome wasn't even a twinkle in Google's eye. That makes today's 10th anniversary of Apple's Safari a significant milestone: the public beta released on January 7th, 2003 represented the first major new competitor to Internet Explorer in years, especially for the initial Mac users who hadn't seen many alternatives. The desktop browser has just a small slice of the market today, but it arguably played an important part in shaping the current market. Safari launched the first practical instance of the now-ubiquitous, KHTML-based WebKit rendering engine that made iOS stand out in 2007 and whose variants power some competing browsers, including Chrome. As project originator Don Melton notes, however, Safari came close to having a different name at one stage. Among other suggestions, the late Steve Jobs was intrigued by the name "Freedom" and spent substantial time exploring its prospects before dropping it and ultimately settling on the Safari label. Such naming debates are common in technology, but they show just how important it was for Apple to make a good first impression; given that Safari is still in healthy use today, we'd say the deliberation paid off.
WebKit turns 10, celebrates a decade of speedy, standards-compliant browsing
It's hard to believe but WebKit, the rendering engine inside Safari and Chrome, is now ten years old. The forked child of KDE's KHTML received its first commit of code from Apple back on August 24th of 2001. It would be well over a year before the debut of Safari in 2003, and another two years before it was fully open sourced. Since then it's begun to replace Gecko (Mozilla) as the rendering engine du jour and even spawned a sequel in Webkit2. So, happy birthday to Apple's greatest contribution to the open source community.
Linden Lab and Torch Mobile: Replacing the Second Life Web-browser
In development discussions surrounding the Second Life viewer's Web-support and internal Web-browser, WebKit has been a frequent discussion item. WebKit was originally derived (by Apple) from the Konqueror browser's KHTML software library and now functions as the core of Apple's Safari Web-browser. A number of companies have extended and adapted WebKit over time. A primary sticking point with adoption into the Second Life viewer, however, involved the terms of WebKit's software license. Now that the licensing barrier has been overcome, work on integrating QtWebKit into the viewer is proceeding apace, as Linden Lab works in conjunction with Torch Mobile (makers of the Iris Browser) to finalize the integration, and sort out a few lingering issues.
