How Safari Pretended to Be Mozilla Before It Was Released

[apfeljonas]

Originally Posted by vastoholic

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?

Hmm, for me Chrome seems faster than Safari.

[shurcooL]

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.

Do you really think it's better than Chrome? I like Chrome's UI so much better, it's cleaner and more minimalistic.

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.

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.

[notjustjay]

Originally Posted by Nermal

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

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.

[Toltepeceno]

I like safari on mac, but for windows it's left far behind.

[Truffy]

Originally Posted by Yvan256

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

Isn't Chrome based on Webkit though?

[Yvan256]

Originally Posted by fabian9

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

It's also not available for Snow Leopard.

[APlotdevice]

Originally Posted by Truffy

Isn't Chrome based on Webkit though?

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.

[moonman239]

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.

[Doctor Q]

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

[rdlink]

Originally Posted by rmwebs

You need to learn what "common knowledge" means

Is this common enough for you?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...address_blocks

[CGagnon]

Originally Posted by 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?

you must be in Anonymous with those skillz

[RMo]

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!

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.

[seanf]

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!

This is publicly available information

Sean

[ebatalha]

Originally Posted by shurcooL

Do you really think it's better than Chrome? I like Chrome's UI so much better, it's cleaner and more minimalistic.

Image


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.

Well, I think Safari's more minimalistic and cleaner than Chrome. I even can hide all the toolbars, Chorme can't.

[rmwebs]

Originally Posted by rdlink

Is this common enough for you?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...address_blocks

You dont get it do you.

Definition of common knowledge:

anything generally known to everyone.

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.

[rdlink]

Originally Posted by rmwebs

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.

[rmwebs]

Originally Posted by rdlink

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.

[TahoeJimbo]

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.

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

[Risco]

Originally Posted by rmwebs

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.

[Lil Chillbil]

I can believe that apple would do something like this

[avanpelt]

I wonder how much it cost them to grab a Class A block in the early '90's?

[Lil Chillbil]

Originally Posted by avanpelt

I wonder how much it cost them to grab a Class A block in the early '90's?

a lot of dough I would say

[mobilehaathi]

I have to admit this was an incredibly boring story. Changing user agent strings? Snore....

[Lil Chillbil]

Originally Posted by mobilehaathi

I have to admit this was an incredibly boring story. Changing user agent strings? Snore....

Well every day can't be the discovery of penicillin

[mobilehaathi]

Originally Posted by Lil Chillbil

Well every day can't be the discovery of penicillin

Perhaps I'm just not the target audience..... oh well.