“Don Melton, who was originally tasked by Scott Forstall to create WebKit and the Safari browser for OS X, and later WebKit of iOS, has retired from his job as engineering director of internet technologies, and begun writing,” Rene Ritchie reports for iMore. “In keeping Safari a secret, Melton talks about how his team had to hide Safari’s user agent string, so the project could remain a secret until Steve Jobs announced it at Macworld 2003.”
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.
Read more in the full article here.
For anyone interested in the history of IE/Mac 5, check out TheWebAhead’s Podcast with Tantek. Interesting stuff. http://5by5.tv/webahead/46
I wonder if they ever thought WebKit would go on to dominate the browser market as it has done.
A great example of Apple working in the open source community. They don’t get enough credit in this respect.
Well said. I’m in full agreement with you!