The Apple browser Safari turns 20: On January 7, 2003, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs proudly presented the in-house browser, which was released as a beta on the same day. Safari is the fastest browser on the Mac. Point,” Jobs emphasized at the time and held out the prospect of further innovations. Hard to imagine today: The standard browser on the Mac at that time was Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Jobs’ big deal with Bill Gates had arranged it years earlier.
However, Internet Explorer 5 also had to struggle with Apple’s major switch from Classic Mac OS to Mac OS X and was becoming increasingly sluggish, especially since Microsoft hardly put any more resources into further development after the release of Safari. Just a few months after the release of Safari, Microsoft discontinued the Mac version of Internet Explorer. In the fall of 2003, Safari became the new default browser for Mac OS X – and it has remained so to this day.
Apple’s browser Safari: KHTML instead of Gecko
Apple relied on its own engine from the very beginning: 20 years ago, Andreas Beier wrote for heise online: “Safari’s rendering engine is based on KHTML, the HTML library of the KDE desktop, which comes from the Linux world. KHTML is HTML4 compatible and supports DOM, Java, JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) among others. According to Jobs, Apple improved about half of the code, some significantly. The further developed code parts should still flow back into the open source project today. “Some people have a problem with open source software,” Jobs taunted Microsoft. “We think it’s great.”
Apple’s decision to use KHTML as the WebKit basis sparked considerable debate at the time, and developers of the Gecko engine, especially Mozilla, felt they were being stepped on. Apple’s Safari chief developer justified the decision not to use the Gecko engine by citing the speed and slimness of the KHTML code.
Safari for Windows – temporarily
Surprisingly, Apple even brought Safari and WebKit to Windows in 2007, but lost interest a few years later and discontinued the Windows version of the browser. By then, Safari had had its big breakthrough on a completely different platform – the iPhone. Safari is not only the pre-installed and indelible standard browser there, but WebKit is still compulsory today: other browser manufacturers are forbidden from using their own engines, and neither Chromium nor Gecko is allowed to run in iOS. WebKit is the foundation of Chrome, Firefox and all other iPhone and iPad browsers. This has been sharply criticized by web developers for years, and Apple hasn’t relented so far.
However, the Digital Markets Act should force the group to allow other browser engines for iOS, at least in Europe. In any case, new competition could persuade Apple to further develop WebKit more quickly.
Popular browser
Safari is quite popular among Mac users. The browser works comparatively quickly, economically and is well integrated into the operating system, but it does not offer the full range of support and compatibility that Google Chrome offers. Especially when running more complex web apps, there are sometimes problems, even though Apple has already announced improvements here. For example, web apps should be able to deliver push messages to iPhones for the first time this year.
In the spring, Apple developers reacted objectively to increasing accusations that Safari was “the new Internet Explorer” and demanded specific information about which problems should be tackled first. Apple also seems to be taking the complaints about lame patches for vulnerabilities in WebKit to heart: At least in macOS 13 and iOS 16, the company can now also provide out-of-order security improvements. The next big Safari version is coming in autumn with iOS 17 and macOS 14.
(lbe)
