How Safari Pretended to Be Mozilla Before It Was Released

[MacRumors]

Former Apple employee Don Melton is sharing a unique look behind the scenes of the Safari development team. Melton was the team leader on both the Safari and WebKit products that are now used by millions of users on both iOS, the Mac, and Windows.

Previously, Melton explained how the Safari name came about, but today he shares the tale of Safari's User Agent string and the strategies his team used to keep the project under wraps.

Twitter and Facebook didn't exist then. Nobody at Apple was stupid enough to blog about work, so what was I worried about?

Server logs. They scared the hell out of me.

When a Web browser fetches a page from a Web server, the browser identifies itself to that server with a user agent string -- basically its name, version, platform, etc. The browser also gives the server an IP address so the server knows where to return the page. This exchange not only makes the Web work, it also allows the server to tell who is using what browser and where they're using it.

You can see where this is going, right? But wait, there's more...

Back around 1990, some forward-thinking IT person secured for Apple an entire Class A network of IP addresses. That's right, Apple has 16,777,216 static IP addresses. And because all of these addresses belong together -- in what's now called a "/8 block" -- every one of them starts with the same number. In Apple's case, the number is 17.

IP address 17.149.160.49? That's Apple. 17.1.2.3? Yes, Apple. 17.18.19.20? Also, Apple. 17.253.254.255? Apple, dammit!

I was so screwed.

Melton's blog has the rest of the details about how his team kept things quiet before the big reveal.

Article Link: How Safari Pretended to Be Mozilla Before It Was Released

[WAM2]

THIS is why I love Apple. Just a bunch of geeks running a company. Now I Cant say Mr. Cook is much of a geek. But the ones who do everything to run apple, are.

[iRCL]

So, he hid Safari as being Mozilla, by changing the user agent string. MAN THIS IS ONE HELL OF A FASCINATING REVEAL

Also, Safari is the best browser out there now, but I am going to go out on a limb and say that there was nobody in the industry that cared when it was released except the Apple fans

[Macrolido]

It´s interesting the fact that he says Scott Forstall was a great boss.

[charlieegan3]

Kind of surprised that this kind of this wasn't suspected/known about already. They could do with disguising it in geek-bench results too, but that would mean fewer rumors

[Rocketman]

Does anyone keep track of how many 10's of millions of instances of Safari are alive in any given day, week, month, or year?

[Risco]

So 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!

[adamw]

Interesting read. I use Safari as my browser of choice. It has been fairly stable.

[alex00100]

Yes, be afraid of us, be afraid.

[BJB Productions]

Too bad Safari is awfully broken. At least for me...

[Michaelgtrusa]

Perhaps a rewrite soon.

[Yvan256]

As far as I know, Safari is no longer available for Windows.

[fabian9]

Originally Posted by Yvan256

As far as I know, Safari is no longer available for Windows.

That's right, Safari 6 isn't available for Windows.

[Hes Nikke]

Originally Posted by Risco

So 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!

It has been common knowledge that apple owns the 17 class A block since forever. This is not a new revelation for those of us who have been apple followers for 20+ years.

[ManWithAPlan]

Originally Posted by Hes Nikke

It has been common knowledge that apple owns the 17 class A block since forever. This is not a new revelation for those of us who have been apple followers for 20+ years.

Correct. And of course it would be trivial to test from another netblock through a separate Internet connection than the main Apple HQ networks, so as to NOT be using 17.x. Nor is it difficult to forge a User Agent String in a web query, it's done all the time for security reasons by various enterprise security products, etc. Even without those products, it's a trivial effort. Nothing surprising at all, wake me up when they get really stealthy. BTW, rumors around the playground are that they have indeed gotten MUCH more stealthy, and Cook is a big believer in the advantages that secrecy can give them - not that they've been always been good at it. But they realize the value in it, he said so on 60 Minutes even (doubling down on secrecy), and I would expect more and more sophisticated attempts to "hide" product plans going forward. The only question is whether those attempts will be successful. Time will tell I guess.

[imgonephishin]

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?

[rmwebs]

Originally Posted by Hes Nikke

It has been common knowledge that apple owns the 17 class A block since forever. This is not a new revelation for those of us who have been apple followers for 20+ years.

You need to learn what "common knowledge" means

[hachre]

Safari is better than ever before right now and has replaced Chrome for me since version 6 has been in beta.

[tobefirst]

I like how the MR article mentions "Mozilla" nowhere except for the title. Reading the MR article itself doesn't tell you at all that they masked Safari as any Mozilla product. That's some quality writing right there!

[stevedun]

Safari was a pain in the neck in it's early versions before becoming the gold standard in Mac web browsers. I've been a Safari advocate for years now.

Version 6, however, is infuriating. The reload-on-back behavior is unacceptable. I use the trackpad or Magic Mouse to swipe back a page, and the animation looks great, but the fact that it forces a reload of the page, delays me while it reloads, and often puts me at the top of the page is a real detractor. I'm trying to deal with it until something changes, but I may need to hop ship to an inferior browser if this basic functionality is not addressed.

[rmwebs]

Originally Posted by tobefirst

I like how the MR article mentions "Mozilla" nowhere except for the title. Reading the MR article itself doesn't tell you at all that they masked Safari as any Mozilla product. That's some quality writing right there!

Yup. It also omits one of the major platforms that use webkit - Android. Brings me back round to this thread: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1510151

[vastoholic]

Originally Posted by hachre

Safari is better than ever before right now and has replaced Chrome for me since version 6 has been in beta.

Hell I even tried to move to chrome last month. It was slower (more beachballs and even youtube seemed to be slower, probably just my head) and had one single fundamental flaw for me: Microsoft Office documents would not download properly, requiring me to go to the file and change the extension just to get it to open up. Silly and trivial, sure, but seriously, why is that kind of issue even there in a browser in 2012-2013?

[notjustjay]

None of this is really news to any of us. I mean, haven't we already seen articles posted on MacRumors that go like "examination of webserver logs reveal iPhone 6 is already being tested"?

Same thing.

[Kobayagi]

Originally Posted by stevedun

Safari was a pain in the neck in it's early versions before becoming the gold standard in Mac web browsers. I've been a Safari advocate for years now.

Version 6, however, is infuriating. The reload-on-back behavior is unacceptable. I use the trackpad or Magic Mouse to swipe back a page, and the animation looks great, but the fact that it forces a reload of the page, delays me while it reloads, and often puts me at the top of the page is a real detractor. I'm trying to deal with it until something changes, but I may need to hop ship to an inferior browser if this basic functionality is not addressed.

Exactly. What also annoys me is that they made the tabs so huge. Now, when you want to close a few of them, you can't simply stand on the X icon and keep clicking, but you have to track down the X every time you close a tab because they keep changing in size.

Though Safari sometimes just doesn't work as nice on some websites. I thought it might be adblock or it's blocking pop ups, but after turning both off, it's still buggy on a few sites. Then I just use Chrome.


Other than that, I really like Safari, it's neat and clean. Top sites are also very nicely done. I just hope they fix some of the issues.

[Nermal]

Originally Posted by notjustjay

None of this is really news to any of us. I mean, haven't we already seen articles posted on MacRumors that go like "examination of webserver logs reveal iPhone 6 is already being tested"?

Same thing.

If anything, that just proves that Apple has lost this "masquerading" technology some time over the past 10 years!