May 6, 2024

How Apple's Safari Browser Was Kept a Secret

Posted January 4, 2013 at 7:58pm by iClarified · 11940 views
Don Melton, who started the Safari and WebKit projects at Apple, reveals how his team kept the browser a secret before its debut.

For much of the time we spent developing Safari — long before it was called by that name — it pretended to be Microsoft Internet Explorer. Specifically, Internet Explorer for Mac, which Apple had provided with the OS since 1998. Less than six months before Safari debuted, it started pretending to be a Mozilla browser.

Why did we do this? And how did we make Safari pretend to be these browsers when its code and behavior were so different?


On January 7, 2003, at Macworld San Francisco, Steve Jobs announced the new web browser called Safari.

Check out Melton's detailed account of how they kept it secret at the link below...

Read More [via Nathan]