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 Safari is a web browser developed by Apple
Computer, Inc. and available as part of Mac OS X. It was included as the
default browser in Mac OS X v10.3 (Panther) and is the only browser
bundled with Mac OS X v10.4 (Tiger).
Safari uses Apple's brushed metal user interface, has a bookmark
management scheme that functions like the iTunes jukebox software,
integrates Apple's QuickTime multimedia technology, and features a
tabbed-browsing interface similar to that of Firefox and Opera. A Google
search box is a standard component of the Safari interface, as are
software services which automatically fill out Web forms and spellcheck
entries into web page text fields. The browser also includes an
integrated pop-up ad blocker and an configurable image blocker.
Since the release of Safari its browser usage share has been
consistently climbing but is still below 5%. For the month of April
2006, thecounter.com reports that Safari has a usage share of 2%[1] and
NetApplications.com reports that Safari has a usage share of 3.3% for
the same time period.[2]
History and development
Until 1997, Apple Macintosh
computers had shipped with Netscape Navigator. Microsoft's Internet
Explorer for Mac was subsequently included as the default web browser as
part of the five-year agreement between Apple and Microsoft. Microsoft
released five major versions of Internet Explorer for Mac, with the last
one being released on March 27, 2000.
On January 7, 2003, Steve Jobs announced that Apple had developed
in-house their own web browser called Safari. They released the first
beta version that day and a number of official and unofficial beta
versions followed, until they released version 1.0 on June 23, 2003.
Available as a separate download initially, it was included with Mac OS
X v10.3 on release on October 24, 2003, as the default browser, with
Internet Explorer for Mac included only as an alternative browser. Since
the release of Mac OS X v10.4 in April 29, 2005, Safari is the only web
browser included with the operating system.
Safari uses Apple's WebKit for rendering web pages and running
JavaScript. WebKit consists of WebCore (based on Konqueror's KHTML
engine) and JavaScriptCore (based on KDE's kjs JavaScript engine). Like
KHTML and kjs, WebCore and JavaScriptCore are free software and are
released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License. Some
Apple improvements to the KHTML code are merged back into the Konqueror
project. Apple also releases additional code under an open source
2-clause BSD-like license.
In June 2005, after some criticism from KHTML developers over lack of
access to change logs, Apple moved the development source code and bug
tracking of WebCore and JavaScriptCore to OpenDarwin.org. WebKit itself
was also released as open source. The source code for non-renderer
aspects of the browser, such as its GUI elements, remains proprietary.
Version 2.0 of Safari, released on April 29, 2005, includes a built in
RSS and Atom reader. Other features include Private Browsing (a mode in
which no record of information about your web activity is retained), the
ability to archive and e-mail webpages, the ability to search bookmarks,
and a reported 1.8x speed boost over version 1.2.4.
In April 2005, Dave Hyatt, one of the Safari developers at Apple,
documented his progress fixing bugs in Safari to get it to pass the
Acid2 test. On April 27, 2005, he announced that his development version
of Safari now passed the test, making it the first web browser to do
so.[3] The changes were not initially available to end-users unless they
downloaded and compiled the WebKit source code themselves or ran one of
the nightly automated builds available at opendarwin.org.[4] However on
October 31, 2005, Apple released version 2.0.2 of Safari that included
the Acid2 bug fixes.
References
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