Safari, Customization, and David Hyatt

[MacRumors]

One of the many significant announcements at Apple's Keynote include Apple's new web-browser - Safari. Contrary to popular speculation, the Apple browser is not based on the Mozilla code-base, and is instead built on KHTML.

David Hyatt who was the creator of Chimera was employed by Apple back in July 2002. This fact perhaps first spawned speculation of an Apple Branded browser. This ars thread spawned first rumors of the project... in October 2002.

David Hyatt continues to maintain a weblog which provides some interesting insight and exciting information about Apple's new Browser.

Mr. Hyatt references this Slashdot article which describes how to use a custom WebCore in Safari. This details some exciting functionality available to advanced users:

So yesterday Apple released Safari web browser, and also the open-source WebCore and JavaScriptCore components. (In Darwin terminology, WebCore and JavaScriptCore are frameworks. Frameworks are kind like DSO's or DLL's to you Unix or Windows folks.)

Because WebCore and JavaScriptCore are open-source (under the LGPL), anybody with a Mac, OS X 10.2, and the development tools can download them and compile them.

Mr. Hyatt apparently enjoyed our previous link to his weblog. Hi David!

 

[shadowfax]

i DO have too much time on my hands, even though that's outrageous.

 

[sebimeyer]

open source

i just love that Apple releases something that directly competes with a Micro$oft product and then makes it open source. They like they were saying "this is 3 times faster than yours and that's why we do exactly what you wouldn't and make it available to everyone." You gotta love that

 

[arn]

Originally posted by Shadowfax
i DO have too much time on my hands, even though that's outrageous.

heh... I hope no one takes david's remark as offensive...

we do have too much time on our hands...

arn

 

[mac15]

Well no wonder apple broke the download record, It was the first thign I grabbed, hell all the people I know downloaded it right after the keynote. I was on apple.com in a flash.

 

[shadowfax]

man, the first darn thing safari did when i loaded it up is go to my homepage, Deskmod.com, and screw it up completely. it was one of the most farcical faulty renderings i have ever seen. it rendered the non-member page fine, and then when i logged in, it totally did it all wrong. i wonder if DM uses XML it doesn't like or something. ugh. so, back to chimera for me. but i am happy that they are open sourcing safari. that is really good of them.

I hate the bookmark structure they have, personally. i hope they give you the option of going back to IE/Mozilla/Chimera style bookmarks. i don't like a tab, all i want on the top of my browser is one bar with back etc., and address bar, and that cool google bar. there didn't seem to be any way to get it to list the bookmarks in the bookmarks tab on the menubar, which i feel is where it belongs.

overall a neat design, and i realize it's beta. i hope final comes out soon. then i'll give it another whirl.

also, i liked it much better with demetallifizer. that helped it tons.

i think it'll take them awhile to unseat Chimera as the best. they probably have the makings to do so, but we shall see.

 

[mjang]

Great effort on David's part

The fact that this guy is willing to stick his neck out in the public viewing space and examine/address what others are blogging about is outstanding.

Just today he wrote about 4 bugs/enhancements being fixed. Great community efforts. Keep plugging away!

MJ

 

[shadowfax]

Re: Great effort on David's part

Originally posted by mjang
The fact that this guy is willing to stick his neck out in the public viewing space and examine/address what others are blogging about is outstanding.

Just today he wrote about 4 bugs/enhancements being fixed. Great community efforts. Keep plugging away!

MJ

yeah, he seems like a very cool guy. kudos to his contributions to this!

i was wondering, how does one get the latest build of this thing? does it have a nightly release like chimera?

 

[3G4N]

300,000 downloads in 24 hours ?!!?

you just might think that people were tired of using IE or something...

 

[MacBandit]

Originally posted by Shadowfax
man, the first darn thing safari did when i loaded it up is go to my homepage, Deskmod.com, and screw it up completely. it was one of the most farcical faulty renderings i have ever seen. it rendered the non-member page fine, and then when i logged in, it totally did it all wrong. i wonder if DM uses XML it doesn't like or something. ugh. so, back to chimera for me. but i am happy that they are open sourcing safari. that is really good of them.

I hate the bookmark structure they have, personally. i hope they give you the option of going back to IE/Mozilla/Chimera style bookmarks. i don't like a tab, all i want on the top of my browser is one bar with back etc., and address bar, and that cool google bar. there didn't seem to be any way to get it to list the bookmarks in the bookmarks tab on the menubar, which i feel is where it belongs.

overall a neat design, and i realize it's beta. i hope final comes out soon. then i'll give it another whirl.

also, i liked it much better with demetallifizer. that helped it tons.

i think it'll take them awhile to unseat Chimera as the best. they probably have the makings to do so, but we shall see.

All you have to do to get all your bookmarks into the menu is to open the Bookmarks collections menu then drag all your bookmarks to the icon labeled bookmarks menu.

Really there are a lot of things you can customize about using Safari even at this new of a beta. I am really impressed though Chimera will be my primary until they give me tabs and the option to have a link in the menu that opens two or more webpages at once in multiple tabs like chimera.

 

[shadowfax]

Originally posted by MacBandit


All you have to do to get all your bookmarks into the menu is to open the Bookmarks collections menu then drag all your bookmarks to the icon labeled bookmarks menu.

Really there are a lot of things you can customize about using Safari even at this new of a beta. I am really impressed though Chimera will be my primary until they give me tabs and the option to have a link in the menu that opens two or more webpages at once in multiple tabs like chimera.

wow, thanks, that isn't as intuitive as i would have hoped, but it works fine. as long as you have the option to arrange it like that, i am more impressed with their new system, which, though i personally dislike it, is definitely thinking different. i can't take the page problems it had with my favorite site on the internet (less macrumors of course ), and yeah, as you mention, tabs. those things are the coolest idea.

those page rendering stats are really impressive. they have only to add the myriad cool features apple is famous for, and this will be very cool. keeping chimera for now though.

 

[retaks]

KHTML

Just wondering it was somewhat of a big deal when people found out it uses khtml vs mozzilla or whatever. I was wondering what are the advantages disadvantages and different types. in otherwords which is best.

 

[mac15]

the mozilla code base is over 1 million lines of code, while KHTML is a lighter at only 150 lines of code, and they both offer the same features, apples picked a lighter version of it.

 

[retaks]

hmm there must be a reason for all that extra code in mozilla. more features mb? there wouldnt be a bunch of extra code for nothing. Well Safari seems great and zippy but we'll see how it does once it starts gettign all the features it lacks. mb tabbed browsing! =]

 

[NicoMan]

Originally posted by mac15
the mozilla code base is over 1 million lines of code, while KHTML is a lighter at only 150 lines of code, and they both offer the same features, apples picked a lighter version of it.

I have never used an other KHTML browser, so I can't really say if this is coming from the rendering engine or Safari, but there are still loads of sites where i am getting problems with alignment of boxes/text/frames and also text wrapping, especially compared with Chimera.

I don't know how often they are going to publish new Safari builds, but knowing the way Apple are working with beta versions, I doubt we will see an update soon, unfortunately (please, please, Apple, prove me wrong).

Who knows....

NicoMan

 

[artistry]

Originally posted by retaks
hmm there must be a reason for all that extra code in mozilla. more features mb? there wouldnt be a bunch of extra code for nothing.

You should see some of the code I produce! Mind you, I only do it for fun. Pros would have a fit if they saw my code!

 

[irmongoose]

All of you who are having trouble rendering pages.. tell Apple about it using the bug button... that's what it's there for. Just tell them what site you're having problems with. I think Apple is serious about this one...




irmongoose

 

[davy the bunny]

Okay I see that everyone seems to be having good experiences with Safari. . . but is anyone having any trouble?

I'm having a few issues with it:

- glacial rendering speed (as compared to Chimera mostly, but still much slower than IE and yes I'm using dial-up but Chimera is nice and quick)

- And when downloading, I can't browse with it or any other browser, I assume it's using every single drop of bandwidth I have. But this is not a problem I have in any other browser.

just wondering if anyone else is having the same issue. . .

 

[robbieduncan]

Originally posted by mac15
the mozilla code base is over 1 million lines of code, while KHTML is a lighter at only 150 lines of code, and they both offer the same features, apples picked a lighter version of it.

150,000 not 150. 150 would be truly something to shout about!

 

[artistry]

Originally posted by davy the bunny
Okay I see that everyone seems to be having good experiences with Safari. . . but is anyone having any trouble?

I'm having a few issues with it:

- glacial rendering speed (as compared to Chimera mostly, but still much slower than IE and yes I'm using dial-up but Chimera is nice and quick)

- And when downloading, I can't browse with it or any other browser, I assume it's using every single drop of bandwidth I have. But this is not a problem I have in any other browser.

just wondering if anyone else is having the same issue. . .

Nope, none of that - downloads are transparent, rendering is very fast. Using DSL in the UK.

 

[artistry]

Apple are listening! (For once)

Check out http://www.mozillazine.org/weblogs/hyatt/ for David Hyatt's updates on progress with the beta. Makes interesting reading...

 

[backspinner]

apparently:
KHTML = made by a small number of professional programmers
Gecko = nice pet project by thousands of hobbyists

 

[artistry]

Applescripts available for Safari

I posted this link in another discussion but just in case you're not reading it:

Apple's scripts for Safari

 

[davy the bunny]

Well from looking at macosrumors.com it seems I'm not alone in experiencing general wonkiness when it comes to retrieval speed and rendering. . .