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Safari: The Browser to Sink Mozilla?
By Remy Davison, Insanely Great Mac
January 14th 2003
Apple's new browser doesn't represent a shot across the bows in a new war - it's a
showcase for OS X technology and a standard for others to aspire to.
"Mozilla code is a gigantic, bloated mess, not to mention slow, and with an internal
API so flamboyantly baroque that frankly we can't even comprehend where to begin."
Those are the words of Hamie Zawinski, a founder of Mozilla, the open-source browser
project under the rubric of AOL Time-Warner.
According to Zawinski, who spoke to ZDNet, Apple is "bad-mouthing" Mozilla and pushing
the KHTML rendering engine, versus Mozilla's Gecko engine.
There are "less than 140,000 lines of code" in Safari, according to Safari Engineering
Manager Don Melton, who wrote an email congratulating KHTML engineers for their work.
Netscape 6.0 was the first browser AOL Time Warner released which was based on the
Mozilla code. Defenders of Mozilla argue that it follows standards and doesn't
discriminate between platforms. However, it has come into criticism for its lack of
speed, particularly compared with the dominant browser, Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
The speediest browser based on the Mozilla code is Chimera which, although lacking a
large number of features, is small and speedy, suffering none of the bloat experienced
by Netscape 6.
Chris Bourdon, product marketing manager for Mac OS X, even went so far as to say that
Apple had considered building its own browser from scratch, but ultimately opted for
KHTML over Gecko/Mozilla. The result - Safari - was a 3MB browser, instead of the 17MB
of Netscape.
Analysis: Cyberdog reborn as Safari is truly a wonderous thing. But unlike Cyberdog,
Apple isn't simply giving a 'technology demonstration' for its own sake, as one
commentator in the article suggests.
Apple isn't trying to take on IE either - not directly. Lest we forget, Apple has had
a 'slow browsing' problem with OS X ever since X's release. The problems were with OS
X itself, and engineers from Opera and elsewhere acknowledged this, as did some Apple
people in more private moments.
The purpose of Safari is to show OS X browsing - and OS X itself - can be fast and
apps can be lean. It sets a new standard. Cupertino hopes it will push the MacBU,
Opera and others to aspire to the same or better standards in their browsers. In sum,
it's an advertisement for OS X. The point is to showcase the power of OS X and
demonstrate that you're not going to be waiting for pages to render on a Mac, despite
what the MHz/GHz crowd might claim.
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