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Apr 12, 2001
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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
 

TehFalcon

macrumors 65816
Jan 6, 2011
1,118
999
United States
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

macrumors 6502
Nov 2, 2011
284
0
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
 

charlieegan3

macrumors 68020
Feb 16, 2012
2,394
17
U.K
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 :(
 

Risco

macrumors 68000
Jul 22, 2010
1,946
262
United Kingdom
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! :eek:
 

adamw

macrumors 6502a
Sep 22, 2006
744
1,787
Interesting read. I use Safari as my browser of choice. It has been fairly stable.
 

Hes Nikke

macrumors member
Apr 16, 2001
94
13
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! :eek:

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

macrumors member
Feb 4, 2008
71
0
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

macrumors regular
Jan 3, 2003
141
0
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? :cool:
 

rmwebs

macrumors 68040
Apr 6, 2007
3,140
0
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 :rolleyes:
 

hachre

macrumors 6502a
Sep 26, 2007
690
43
Safari is better than ever before right now and has replaced Chrome for me since version 6 has been in beta.
 

tobefirst ⚽️

macrumors 601
Jan 24, 2005
4,612
2,335
St. Louis, MO
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

macrumors member
Feb 13, 2012
35
2
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.
 

vastoholic

macrumors 68000
Jan 28, 2009
1,957
1
Tulsa, OK
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

macrumors 603
Sep 19, 2003
6,056
167
Canada, eh?
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

macrumors 6502a
Dec 18, 2012
918
2,075
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

Moderator
Staff member
Dec 7, 2002
20,595
3,934
New Zealand
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!
 
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