Michal Ždanský Don Melton, one of the people behind the development of the first version of Safari, wrote on his blog about the secretive process that surrounded the development of the Internet browser. Back when Apple didn't have its own browser, users could choose between the then-existing Internet Explorer for Mac, Firefox, or a few other alternatives. However, Steve Jobs decided that it would be best to have a custom browser pre-installed in the operating system. He therefore assigned Scott Forstall to oversee the development team that Melton led.
Developing a browser is far different than developing other software. Because you can't get by with a handful of beta testers in an internal environment, the browser needs to be tested on thousands of pages to ensure that it renders the pages correctly. However, this was a problem, since, like most projects, the browser was created in extreme secrecy. The problem for Melton was already in finding people, because he was not allowed to tell them what they would be working on before they accepted the job.
Even other workers on campus were not allowed to know what this smaller team was working on. The browser was created behind closed doors. Forstall trusted Metn, which he said was one of the many things that made him a great boss. Ironically, Forstall was fired last year precisely because of arrogance and unwillingness to cooperate. Melton wasn't afraid of an inside leak. Twitter and Facebook didn't exist yet, and no one with enough sense would blog about the project. Even the beta testers were very confidential, although they were properly supervised.
The only danger thus lay in the server's records. Each internet browser is identified when visiting a website, especially by name, version number, platform and, last but not least, IP address. And that was the problem. In 1990, a computer scientist managed to secure all the static IP addresses of the Class A network, of which Apple had almost 17 million at the time.
This would allow site owners to easily detect that the visit was from an Apple campus, identifying the browser with an unknown name. At that moment, anyone could joke that Apple is creating its own Internet browser. That's exactly what Melton needed to prevent so Steve Jobs could dazzle everyone at MacWorld 2003 on January 7th. Melton came up with a clever idea to hide Safari from the public.
He modified the string containing the user agent, i.e. the browser identifier, to impersonate a different browser. At first, Safari (the project was still far from the official name) claimed to be Internet Explorer for Mac, then half a year before its release it pretended to be Mozilla's Firefox. However, this measure was only needed on campus, so they modified the given string to allow the display of the real user agent. It was especially needed for compatibility testing on large sites of the time. So that the string with a real user agent is not disabled even in the final version, the developers came up with another clever solution - the string was automatically enabled after a certain date, which was January 7, 2003, when the public beta version was also released. After that, the browser no longer hid behind others and proudly announced its name in the server logs - Safari. But how the browser came to this name, that's it another story.
On January 7, among other things, Safari celebrated its tenth birthday since its inception. Today, it has a global share of under 10%, making it the 4th most used browser, which is not bad considering that it is exclusively used on the Mac platform (it left Windows in its 11th version).
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so this information doesn't fit me "In 1990, a computer scientist managed to secure all the static IP addresses of the Class A network, of which Apple had almost 17 at the time."
thanks for the article, would you also write something about webkit? today, with the chrome browser, engine on mobile devices and inspect tools, it literally dominates.
In the original article it is written about many more IP addresses - "That's right, Apple has 16,777,216 static IP addresses". You only list 17000…
Thanks for the warning, fixed.
I didn't know Safari was no longer for Windows. I recommended it to a few friends and no one mentioned to me that it was over. Um.