Apple Thanks WebKit Developers

[MacRumors]

http://www.macrumors.com/images/macrumorsthreadlogo.gif (http://www.macrumors.com)

In June 2005 (http://www.macrumors.com/pages/2005/06/20050607185418.shtml), Apple started the WebKit Open Source Project. WebKit is the basis for Apple's web browser core which powers Safari (http://guides.macrumors.com). The open source project has drawn programming contributions from non-Apple employees providing constant improvements to the core of Apple's browsing technology.

As a "Thank You", Apple is giving (http://webkit.opendarwin.org/blog/?p=44) MacBook Pro laptops to 12 of the top contributors to the project, and 5 are being invited to Apple's 2006 World Wide Developer's Conference "on Apple's dime".

More information on WebKit can be found at http://webkit.opendarwin.org/

[iGary]

How do I get one?

Good on them for making Safari much much better.

[kretzy]

I wish I knew something about developing so I could've helped and got a MBP. :( ;)

I think it's very thoughtful of Apple to give such gifts to people who really deserve it.

[Sharewaredemon]

It must be nice for those guys to get those computers, quite a nice token on Apple part if you ask me.

[eric_n_dfw]

Talk about a great way to encourge developers to work on Apple software! Throw GOOD free stuff at them!

Being a former OpenStep tinkerer, but never being able to justify the cost of the OPENSTEP software from NeXT, I was excited that the OS X Dev tools were free with OS X. I still didn't have the time to do more than tinker with it though.

Then, when they gave all of the Intel preview machine leaseholders an Intel iMac last month, I was kicking myself for not having been more active in learning Cocoa.

Now, I'm absolutely going to light a fire under my butt to get those Objective-C skills up to speed and start working on something so I can try to win the next freebie Apple throws out! I mean, as a J2EE developer what, exactly, is Sun going to give me like this? A T-Shirt at JavaWorld? A Duke figurine? They sure as hell aren't throwing top end laptops at us!

[iGary]

Remember how bad Safari sucked when they released it? :eek:

[Chaszmyr]

Remember how bad Safari sucked when they released it? :eek:

Remember how bad every Mac browser sucked when they released Safari? :rolleyes:

[ifjake]

now this is how you support the open source community.

[nxent]

yeh! i..ummm... worked on safari too... how bout sending that invite my way, along with that probook

[Chaszmyr]

now this is how you support the open source community.

Giving new Macs to talented developers is also a clever way to get them to continue developing.

[Damien]

Safari is still pretty poor, but i am glad they have a system where people can add code. Should speed up the quality

[~Shard~]

Safari is still pretty poor, but i am glad they have a system where people can add code. Should speed up the quality

I disagree, I think Safari is great. What are the specific reasons why you find it so poor? Just curious. It's all I use on my Mac, and Firefox on my PC - no mroe need for IE, I love it! :D

I think this is a classy move on Apple's part. Something they didn't need to do, but a great gesture. Well done Apple. :cool:

[jsw]

Of course, the true brilliance here is that Apple now will get scores of people working as unpaid developers, expecting a shot at another MBP, when, in reality, Apple probably has no plans to release any more. ;)

Edit: and, yes, that's sour grapes on my part because I didn't hep with the SVG support in WebKit....

[Tegosaurus]

All I am wondering now is... when will they get their machines? What are the shipping dates :)

Nice gesture from Apple for sure!

[dornoforpyros]

hmm a nice gesture for sure, but couldn't they also "pay" people for the work they do? I mean I understand the open source movement and all that, but apple isn't an open source company, and no they don't sell safari on it's own but you've still gotta buy something from them to use it.

[SiliconAddict]

That is what is known as style and is what has been missing from Apple for a long LONG time. Hopefully this is a return to the Apple of old.

[savar]

now this is how you support the open source community.

maybe this will put to rest the accusations that apple neglects its open source community -- taking and never giving back?

[Fiveos22]

Remember how bad every Mac browser sucked when they released Safari? :rolleyes:

This is subjective, but does Camino (http://www.caminobrowser.org/) suck? 'Cause they were out well before safari.

[jared_kipe]

Wow, go Apple, most companies are not like that. Apple needs to claim that large prize for dual booting windows on osx.

[gauchogolfer]

I guess there's always at least one person who can find something wrong with every story, but sheesh. Maybe they're just numbers 13-15 and thus are angry about missing out on the MBPs ;)

[nagromme]

Very cool! And Safari is definitely my browser of choice (and better in Tiger than Panther). I use IE and Firefox only for testing sites I build, to see what others see.

Now... one time I had a page that took 2 tried to load, and I clicked Report Bug to tell Apple about it.

Surely that's worth at least a video iPod? Black, please.

[Stella]

Thats a really good gesture.

Webkit has come a long way in quite a short space of time. Safari has one of the best CSS implementations around. Though still quite a few rendering bugs to fix.

Without Webkit being open source, Safari (and all other apps that use it) wouldn't be as advanced as it is today.

Remember how bad every Mac browser sucked when they released Safari? :rolleyes:

Can't agree with that - Gecko ( that is Mozilla, Firefox etc ) based browers have always been good.

[nagromme]

The only browsers I really liked before Safari were OmniWeb and Chimera/Camino. But those were and are great browsers. Firefox is fine too--I like how Find works--but I still prefer Safari.

I like that Safari is metal, not white--it makes the controls nicely separated from the visual page (which is typically white). But I think the new iLife 06 metal look would be even better! And I'm sure that's coming.

[bankshot]

I disagree, I think Safari is great. What are the specific reasons why you find it so poor? Just curious. It's all I use on my Mac, and Firefox on my PC - no mroe need for IE, I love it! :D

For me, Safari blows because:

Many websites take forEVER to render. NewEgg.com (http://www.newegg.com/) is a perfect example. Best Buy (http://www.bestbuy.com/) is another. Shopping at these sites with Safari is painful.


It's a huge, bloated memory hog. Kind of ironic for the browser that was supposed to be fast and lean, huh? :rolleyes: After a day or so of browsing, its memory footprint races steadily up towards a gigabyte. Closing tabs/windows doesn't help. Before I maxed out my G4 PM at 1.5 gig, it was absolutely atrocious with 640 MB.

That said, I still use Safari for for 95% or more of my browsing on the Mac. Mostly for irrational reasons. :D The other small portion is in Firefox -- usually when I get fed up with one of Safari's problem sites (slow rendering) or when something actually doesn't work at all (the best example is motion video from this camera (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0002GS4Z0/); still images work great, but motion only works in Firefox). The only real reasons I don't use Firefox full time are that it feels just a hair slower for basic UI stuff (creating new windows, scrolling, etc), and I prefer the native Mac feel of Safari. Kind of silly when Firefox actually has much better privacy controls and other nice "attention to detail" features.

[gnasher729]

hmm a nice gesture for sure, but couldn't they also "pay" people for the work they do? I mean I understand the open source movement and all that, but apple isn't an open source company, and no they don't sell safari on it's own but you've still gotta buy something from them to use it.

There is a certain amount of work done by unpaid volunteers, but a lot of work comes from people who get paid by their company to produce open source software. For companies it makes a lot of sense; they don't get paid in cash, but by being able to use the software that other people create. Cooperation is the cheapest way to create large amounts of software.

Whether these guys did the work for pay or not, getting a MacBook Pro will be a nice surprise and makes them feel appreciated. And I think a list of contributors #1 to #20 might be in some file at Human Resources in Cupertino.

[FaasNat]

I disagree, I think Safari is great. What are the specific reasons why you find it so poor? Just curious. It's all I use on my Mac, and Firefox on my PC - no mroe need for IE, I love it! :D
[.....]
I think Safari is nice as well, but it could learn some things from Firefox. I like Firefox's ability to configure which sites are allowed to have popup windows and which don't, it's ability to block images from certain servers, the way it searches for words on the page, and its cookie management. I also like Google's googlebar implementation on Firefox much better than the Google search box in Safari.

[FaasNat]

maybe this will put to rest the accusations that apple neglects its open source community -- taking and never giving back?
I think the thought behind that complaint was that Apple wasn't contributing code back to the community.

[Stella]

I think Safari is nice as well, but it could learn some things from Firefox. I like Firefox's ability to configure which sites are allowed to have popup windows and which don't, it's ability to block images from certain servers, the way it searches for words on the page, and its cookie management. I also like Google's googlebar implementation on Firefox much better than the Google search box in Safari.

I too like that ability and wish Safari had this.

But Apple won't implement this in Safari.

Why?

Too complex ( for the below average capable user ).

[Stridder44]

Nice move Apple!


Reading this and the comments makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside

[manu chao]

This is subjective, but does Camino (http://www.caminobrowser.org/) suck? 'Cause they were out well before safari.

It sucked back then because it crashed a lot. Now it's my browser of choice.

[aftk2]

Can't agree with that - Gecko ( that is Mozilla, Firefox etc ) based browers have always been good.

*cough* Netscape 6 Beta *cough*

Although I suppose that's not really fair.

[pinto32]

Once again, kudos to apple for showing thier thanks. Hopefully, they keep this up. I also wouldnt be surprised if those 5 developers that are going to WWDC end up on the Apple payroll in a few months...it looks like working on open source can be a route to a great job.

[Fender2112]

Pretty cool as long as Apple doesn't ship them with a 1099. :D That's always the down side of freebies.

[sehix]

For me, Safari blows because:

[list] Many websites take forEVER to render. NewEgg.com (htpp://www.newegg.com/) is a perfect example. Best Buy (http://www.bestbuy.com/) is another. Shopping at these sites with Safari is painful.

Newegg would probably come up faster if you tried http:// instead of htpp:// in your link.

Seriously, there may be more of an issue with your ISP than with Safari itself; both sites pop up quickly, and navigation is unexceptional here, whether on an intel iMac, or a Mini.

[CubaTBird]

freakin' awesome.. apple is really pro open source as far as i can tell.. i belive steve even mentioned it at the mwsf 2003 keynote address if i am not mistaken? :confused: that was when safari had just debuted into beta form.

[bankshot]

Newegg would probably come up faster if you tried http:// instead of htpp:// in your link.

Uhh, what are you talking about? (fixed, thanks :D)

Seriously, there may be more of an issue with your ISP than with Safari itself; both sites pop up quickly, and navigation is unexceptional here, whether on an intel iMac, or a Mini.

Nope. ISP is fine, and plenty of other sites with similar complexity load quite fast in Safari. I don't just mean it's slow, which could be more of a network issue than anything else. It takes a huge amount of CPU time to render these sites, resulting in a nice beachball while I wait for my page. At home I'm on a 733 MHz G4, and it's ridiculously slow - well over a minute burning full CPU to render a page with lots of stuff listed.

Just for fun, I did a little test on a dual 2.0 G5 here at work (Panther Server, Safari 1.2.4). Using the unix 'top' program, I watched total CPU usage as Safari loaded the main NewEgg page. It used 10 seconds of 2.0 GHz G5 CPU time. Not just 10 seconds real time, but 10 seconds CPU time. Firefox 1.5.0.1 takes 2.4 seconds on the same machine, and renders the page more correctly too. To be fair, I don't recall the same rendering bug on Safari 1.3 and up, but I don't have that in front of me right now.

This page (http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?N=2000370060&Submit=ENE&Page=1&SubCategory=60&PageSize=100), listing 100 items, is even worse. Safari took 22 seconds of CPU time to render it on the G5. Just imagine how slow it is on my G4! Firefox took 6 seconds on the G5.

Obviously these sites may have needless complexities in their HTML, since others with similar layouts render much faster on both browsers. Good thing Steve didn't use NewEgg or Best Buy to demonstrate how Safari on the Intel iMac is "instant." I'm sure it's fast, but nowhere near instant on these sites.

And yeah, the G4 was low end when I bought it 4 years ago, but it's still quite snappy for the vast majority of websites, so I wouldn't blame it on an old machine. All I'm saying is that Safari still has plenty of room for improvement. And with open source contributors continuing to refine kHTML and therefore WebKit, I'm hoping it'll get there. MacBooks as thanks won't hurt. (yay, finally back on the main topic here) ;)

[FaasNat]

[.....]

Too complex ( for the below average capable user ).
Well, this could be address by a toggle in the preferences. Much like how the tabbed browsing is disabled by default and needs to be turned on to be able to use it. Something like that....

[Fiveos22]

This page (http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?N=2000370060&Submit=ENE&Page=1&SubCategory=60&PageSize=100), listing 100 items, is even worse. Safari took 22 seconds of CPU time to render it on the G5. Just imagine how slow it is on my G4! Firefox took 6 seconds on the G5.



That page took me 22 seconds to load with FF on a windows machine (its not internet connection, unless a fibre connection to I2 is considered slow).

I think that it may just be a poorly coded page...but I dunno.

[Mr. Mister]

Too bad I've already switched to Firefox. :rolleyes:

[Fireburst]

Safari has sure come a long way this last year. I prefer Safari to Firefox when on a Mac but use Firefox on PC's. The new version of IE is actually quite nice (I never thought I would say that!) so I may switch back to the dark side for when I am using a PC :eek: