{"id":6755,"date":"2013-01-04T17:06:06","date_gmt":"2013-01-04T22:06:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=6755"},"modified":"2013-01-04T17:06:10","modified_gmt":"2013-01-04T22:06:10","slug":"keeping-safari-a-secret","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2013\/01\/04\/keeping-safari-a-secret\/","title":{"rendered":"Keeping Safari a Secret"},"content":{"rendered":"

Don Melton<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Not only was I tasked by Scott Forstall with building a browser and building a team to build that browser, I had to keep the whole damn project a secret. Which, by the way, really complicated the shit out of hiring most of the original team since I couldn’t tell them what they were working on until they took the job.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He also has some interesting comments at Hacker News<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I would love to claim the foresight of planning for the iPhone all along. Alas, that was not the case. :) For any of us.<\/p>\n

We built our own browser because we didn’t want to depend on another company for a critical application.<\/p>\n

We built our own browser engine because we wanted to use the technology in more things than a browser.<\/p>\n

We built that engine small and fast because Bertrand Serlet would have shot me if I had done otherwise. :)<\/p>\n

You have to remember that Mac OS X itself was smaller in those days. Not iOS small, but considerably smaller that it is now.<\/p>\n

After the initial success of Mac Safari, there was a time when I was second-guessed by some for choosing KHTML and KJS as the basis for WebKit. When we decided to do the iPhone, I was suddenly a genius again. :)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>

Commenter lgg<\/a> (Louis Gerbarg<\/a>?):<\/p>\n

To drive home Don’s point about how secret Alexander was: I was given official access to Marklar months before Alexander. Since there was no Rosetta at that time the Intel builds of OS X had no bundled web browser (and porting Chimera or Mozilla were clearly nowhere on that team’s priority list at the time, for obvious reasons). I was eventually given access to Alexander largely because I was doing enough Intel related work that it was necessary to have access to a browser on my Intel machines.<\/p><\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Don Melton: Not only was I tasked by Scott Forstall with building a browser and building a team to build that browser, I had to keep the whole damn project a secret. Which, by the way, really complicated the shit out of hiring most of the original team since I couldn’t tell them what they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[30,32,103],"class_list":["post-6755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-mac","tag-macapp","tag-safari"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6755"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6755\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6756,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6755\/revisions\/6756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}