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How Safari Pretended to Be Mozilla Before It Was Released
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Do you really think it's better than Chrome? I like Chrome's UI so much better, it's cleaner and more minimalistic.
I've never used Safari full time, but I like the latest version the most.
I agree it sucks it reloads pages on back/forward instead of caching them. Chrome has the same problem. The only browser I've used that had proper caching was Opera, and I really wish Chrome and Safari would copy that feature.
I suspect they just don't care anymore. Or, maybe more likely, they want these little tidbits of data to be "leaked", as it keeps the media buzzing.
Indeed. And Chrome has what is generally considered the better JS engine. The only problem is that it can't sync with the iOS version of Safari. Sure it can sync with the iOS version of Chrome, but that's so much slower due to the fact that third party browsers on iOS must use the comparatively crippled UIWebView.
Surely I'm not the only one who thinks that an Apple employee visiting a Webpage on his work computer might cause some speculation of some sort to be generated.
As an example, let's say I upload a concept video to my Website. Later, in my server logs/analytics software, I notice an IP address starting with 17, indicating that an Apple employee must have watched the video. It may be reasonable to assume that the concept has been, or will be, pitched to members of the appropriate engineering team. I'd have stronger evidence to support that claim if that page has been downloaded through Apple's network a bunch of times.
As an example, let's say I upload a concept video to my Website. Later, in my server logs/analytics software, I notice an IP address starting with 17, indicating that an Apple employee must have watched the video. It may be reasonable to assume that the concept has been, or will be, pitched to members of the appropriate engineering team. I'd have stronger evidence to support that claim if that page has been downloaded through Apple's network a bunch of times.
I'm not surprised that Apple was aware of the need to hide a product under development while creating Safari, but I'm surprised that they haven't done this more routinely for all of their product development.
Leaks from logs are still a great source of rumors for us rumormongers. Example: Mac OS X 10.9 showing up in web logs
Leaks from logs are still a great source of rumors for us rumormongers. Example: Mac OS X 10.9 showing up in web logs
You need to learn what "common knowledge" means
Is this common enough for you?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks
I frequently used to change my user agent string when a site would tell me I had to use IE or FF to access it and 9 times out of 10 it would work fine in Safari. Can I write an article about my 1337 hacking skillz?
you must be in Anonymous with those skillz
And it's not entirely accurate, either. The UA string was IE:mac for all of the development cycle until they switched it to Mozilla less than six months before launch.
This really isn't surprising at all. The only thing that makes it more interesting than "hiding" other software development is that it's a browser, Apple's IP address block is widely known, and so they'd be wise to mask the UA as something else so admins didn't start seeing a weird browser from Apple in their logs and spread the word and suspicion.
And that's exactly what they did: masked the UA string. I guess there are two other interesting parts, that they didn't mask it when it was used off-campus (probably good for testing), and they set the mask to expire regardless after the reveal. So it's interesting that they went through this much effort--particularly the last two--but not incredibly surprising. That's exactly what you'd need to do, and they did it.
This is publicly available informationSo now if anyone looks their server logs and see a 17 in the IP at the beginning, they know it is a good chance of it being Apple!
Tim Cook is sure doubling up on secrecy!
Sean
Well, I think Safari's more minimalistic and cleaner than Chrome. I even can hide all the toolbars, Chorme can't.
You dont get it do you.
Definition of common knowledge:
No. No. Its not common knowledge. It may be common knowledge in a niche group of people who study the ins and outs of who owns what IP blocks, but to the average 'Joe' it is not, never has been, and will never be common knowledge.
Get it now?
It'd be like me saying "It's common knowledge that Titanium Mobile has problems working with large SQLite databases". It's common knowledge to a Titanium Mobile developer, but not to anyone else. This is the same situation.
That's absolutely ridiculous. When did you become the arbiter of the break over point when something becomes common knowledge? It's interesting that you only grabbed part of the quote that supposedly defines common knowledge. How about the complete sentence (emphasis added by me)?
"Common knowledge is knowledge that is known by everyone or nearly everyone, usually with reference to the community in which the term is used."
If you take the complete sentence in context, common knowledge would be known by anyone who is a member of a specific "community." In this case that community could be overlapping communities of Apple following geeks, networking engineers, web administrators or IP block groupies.
Under your ridiculous assertion of what common knowledge is, there would probably be only two or three things in the world that were "common knowledge."
So yes, I do "get it." You apparently do not.
So you think its common knowledge, that people who read macrumors.com are people who should study what IP space each company has? Right. Got it.
That forward thinking IT person was me.
I managed the internal address space for Apple before the internet became the internet. We used an invalid network number (well, a public address that we didn't own) and when it came time to join the internet, we had to get a real number. NAT didn't really exist at the time, so I justified the address space by calculating how many computers we had, our average subnet size, and showed that only a "Class-A" network (/8 in CIDR notation) could possibly work.
At first Joyce Reynolds (the amazing and now famous numbering mistress at USC's ISI) assigned us 21, which belonged to the military. After a few sweetly apologetic emails, she assigned us 17.
I joked with her that we went from being old enough to drink, to being a teenager.
I left Apple in 1993.
-JJJB
So you think its common knowledge, that people who read macrumors.com are people who should study what IP space each company has? Right. Got it.
Totally agree with you there mate. On his assumption pretty much everything would be common knowledge as it is searchable on the internet if you look hard enough. I would not have known about it without either it be pointed out to me, or having a reason to look it up.
