Apple Introduces Web Browser: Not Based on Gecko

Apple introduced a webbrowser called Safari at MacWorld today. The surprising thing is that it's not based on the Gecko engine, but instead uses the KHTML toolkit that is used in KDE Konqueror. The Gecko-based iBrowser rumours seemed believable when Apple hired David Hyatt last year.

According to the press release, it's the fastest browser available for the Mac. Steve Jobs is even quoted as saying “...we predict that many will feel it is the best browser ever created. We are bringing innovation back into this category with the first all new browser created in many years.”

I think tabbed browsing has been the best innovation in "the web browser category" in years, but I don't see tabbed browsing listed in Safari's feature-set.

Safari is available as a public beta today.

» posted by pinder on January 07, 2003 at 12:04 PM

Comments

look at the icons for the bookmarks. It uses lots of the same widget set as the latest Chimera stuff and there's bits of the MPL in the acknowledgements. This isn't just KHTML.

# posted by Nick

It´s sad, but true. They used KHTML. But this version of KHTML includes some changes to make it more compatible with Gecko. See the following link for details:

http://lists.kde.org/?l=kfm-devel&m=104196912316326&w=2

# posted by Stefan

How could they leave out tabbed browsing?

I supose it is still beta, let's hope they try to match Mozilla/Gecko features during development.

# posted by pete

mark pilgrim has posted a review of Safari as well as a Safari resource for web designers featuring screenshots of various CSS rendering bugs and successes

# posted by pinder

It's sad that they don't base it on Gecko because that means it will take even longer for inline-svg to be usable in websites. I was hoping there would be a revolution in 2003-2004 for inline CSS-controlled vector graphics. But now we will probably have to wait, wait and wait and use Flash. Blah.
ps. I just opened a blog at forss.to/feed!

# posted by Eric Wahlforss

I thought I would test Safari's SVG abilities, and was at least surprised that it did render my test SVG properly. (Though I didn't test inline-SVG's.)

# posted by pete

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