8 ms·
When I first heard the name "Safari"
- bdcravens 14y ago“Please don’t let us name the browser after a feminine hygiene product!” Ironic that this was a concern, given the later iPad
- donmelton 14y agoDamn. I should have used that joke in the essay.
- SimHacker 14y agoOr iBrator: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqN6749QqtA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqN6749QqtA
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Digit-Al 14y agoHa, ha. So, if we have the iPad mini, should there be a larger version called the iPad maxi?
- yen223 14y agoCalling the browser 'Safari' is weird, if you think about it. I remember trying to teach my mom how to use the iPad to access the internet: "First press the home button" "Ok" "Now tap on Safari" "But I don't want to see animals" "..." And that's when I realized why Internet Explorer was so successful.
- namank 14y agoDo it again and see the reaction now. Safari is not for one time use.
- zephjc 14y agoI don't know - when I first heard the name, 'Safari' made sense to me after a moment of thinking about it. Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer, and Safari - all named around the theme of discovery.
- donmelton 14y agoOr sports utility vehicles.
- sigkill 14y agoWow, that's actually spot on. 1. Lincoln Navigator - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Navigator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Navigator 2. Ford Explorer - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Explorer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Explorer 3. Tata Safari - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Safari http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Safari
- Someone 14y agoWell, it fits with the theme. "Safari" is Swahili for "journey" or "trip" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari#Etymology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari#Etymology) That fits it in with the browsers of the time: Netscape Navigator Internet Explorer I would guess the code name 'Alexander' came from 'Alexander the Great', who not only traveled a lot, but also conquered, just like Safari was aiming to conquer the Internet. They must have ignored the 'die young' aspect of that connotation. Safari also has the right feelings associated with it with almost everybody. Some will think "hah, killing elephants", others will think "paying people to help me watch elephants, so that they no longer need or want to kill them", but nobody (nowadays) will associate negative thoughts (exploiting the natives; killing rare animals) with it. And, apparently, there also is a link with surfing the ocean: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfin_Safari http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfin_Safari. I think that may have led to thinking of the name, but I doubt that is strong enough to choose the name.
- donmelton 14y agoI'll write another post about why we called it "Alexander." You're not far from the mark about it being related to "Alexander the Great." But not for the reason you think.
- bgarbiak 14y agoWell, I can't see how "killing elephants" is different than "exploiting the natives; killing rare animals". Safari is phonetically a very nice name, however it still bears negative connotations. At least for some people.
- rmk2 14y ago> "But I don't want to see animals" If we do not count the typical geek crowd (HN, /. etc.), then I am pretty sure most people go online to do exactly that: go on a safari, see animals (baby animals! cats! cats! dogs! cats!), babies, and Facebook is sort of a safari, allowing you to observe your online friends in their natural habitat. ;)
- sbmassey 14y agoI vaguely associated it with "Surfin' Safari" and the Beach Boys.
- dakotasmith 14y agoMe too. At the time it was released, the metaphor of “surfing the web” was still very strong.
- mturmon 14y agoAnd there's this: https://www.webkit.org/blog/ https://www.webkit.org/blog/
- city41 14y agoI've always felt Microsoft has been very good at grabbing very generic, "standard" names: Word, Office, Windows, Internet Explorer, etc. These names become very iconic in and of themselves and they just "feel" like the market leader, whether you are familiar with them or not.
- vacri 14y agoI really wish that MS didn't also name their file manager 'Explorer'. "Okay, now open Explorer... no, not Internet Explorer..."
- benzor 14y agoI've always felt that picking a solid name is one of those things that will never happen while I'm thinking about it intently. Glad to hear it's the same for the big boys too...
- augustl 14y agoI think many of you in the Hacker News crowd will recognize this problem that I'm yet to find a solution to myself: mkdir [blinking cursor] Then 30 minutes passes and you didn't end up making that thing anyway since you got distracted while thinking up a name for it.
- barking 14y agoI don't get to name many projects. But when I'm naming procedures I want the name to be self-documenting without being too long. Frequently I get exasperated and name it blah or sdfbdhfs!
- namank 14y agoI have designated an in-prog folder and call it 'dev'. Everything in dev is strictly modifiable.
- JasonFruit 14y agoWorking in a folder called dev feels wrong to me. It's like having a folder called 'bin' that is a trash bin.
- jfoutz 14y agofoo? bar? qux? metasyntacticvariable? potato? name it something. mv works if you need to change it.
- VMG 14y agoit also should be somewhat unique so that sed -ie can do its job
- pistoriusp 14y agoI always start with a codename. And for the longest time I've used the surnames of foreign scientists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_scientists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_scientists
- ksec 14y agoThe name Safari is still one of those mystery to me, I like the name, and my guess it properly came from the idea of Navigation -> Compass - > Safari. Although i was expecting a post to truly reveal the mystery behind the reason for such a name.
- georgeg 14y agoSafari is a swahili name(Swahili is spoken by people of the East-coast of Africa). It means a journey or an adventure. It could also mean a great undertaking. Steve must have known this from his many journeys.:)
- opinali 14y agoI also suspect that this name came from some snark from Jobs against the web. If the browser is Safari, then logically, the WWW is a wild jungle. Even more relevant today, as Apple champions the idea of walled gardens in opposition to open application platforms.
- mmariani 14y agoGreat story. It shows that doesn't matter if you are Apple or a solo developer, product naming is hard. Actually, as the OP, I find coding easier. Nevertheless, we can't ship products with placeholder names. I have a little brainstorming process that goes like this: 1) List the name of all competitors that made into the business plan; // this is important mainly to avoid problems 2) List of nouns that evoke a basic understanding of the root problem the program tries to solve; // I know it's obvious, but finding a name right here create an instant connection with your target users 3) List all the features that make the program stand out; // Again it's obvious, yet this is a great source of names 4) Mix and match all these these words, throw them into a bucket, and sleep on it for a while; 5) Usually, after some days have passed I come back, and weed out the crapy ones; // and... 6) Work a little more on the rest with a dictionary, if needed go back to 3; 7) Finally, when I have a short list of good names I try to find domain names; 8) mkdir <project_name> // or mv <old> <new> :) How do you go about your process?
- henrikschroder 14y agoOurs is pretty much like that, with one more step: Google each candidate name. Those that get few hits or hits that are completely unrelated to the problem domain get a +1.
- melvinmt 14y agoBut why is the icon a compass though?
- gurkendoktor 14y agoI actually think it makes the name work. It'd feel a little childish if the browser was called Safari and the icon would show a jeep or binoculars.
- chris_wot 14y agoWhere do you want to go today?
- terhechte 14y agoWhen you're on a safari in amazonas, that's what you need in order to find your way (well, nowadays a GPS might do wonders, but when the name safari was historically established, there was no gps)
- groby_b 14y agoTrust me, when you're out in the boondocks, you still want a compass. Sure, GPS is great. Until you can't find a satellite, or it runs out of batteries, or a gazillion other things that can go wrong with electronics in the wilderness.
- arrrg 14y agoBecause you use it to navigate, also on Safaris? That’s one of those things that make perfect sense to me. I’m mystified in what respect that would not be a fitting icon. It’s certainly better than an “e”.
- jpxxx 14y agoThe weird thing about Safari is that it's simultaneously a niche irrelevance on a minor computing platform, a groundbreaking web browser of major historical import, and the public face of the most important wad of code in play on Earth today.
- JGuo 14y agoNot sure of the actual origin, but it seems to me that Safari is a reference to "journey", and works with the OS X naming after big cats. Then again it could just make sense in hindsight.
- marijn 14y agoI always assumed it was a reference to "Surfin' Safari", the Beach Boys song. Maybe not.
- danielsamuels 14y agoThat name is used on the WebKit blog - https://www.webkit.org/blog/ https://www.webkit.org/blog/
- stuaxo 14y ago"We could ship a browser in a year" he missed the second part "thanks to work done on kHTML which we based it on"
- Someone 14y agoI would think it is more 'did not feel fitting for this story' than 'missed'. He isn't mentioning any other parts they built on either (Cocoa, the Mac OS Unix-based networking code, the font designers for Mac OS system fonts, the GNU project for gcc, K&R's progamming language design, etc)
- kragen 14y agoShipping a browser in a year, starting with a browser, is less impressive than shipping a browser in a year starting from a GUI toolkit. (To be fair, Mozilla shipped a browser in a few months after founding, and Konqueror didn't work well enough for me to use it as my primary browser at the time that the Safari guys took it. And, as the other comment pointed out, it actually took the Safari guys a couple of years.)
- lgg 14y agoIn the context of the story that is irrelevant, and it is actually not correct. Don Melton started at Apple in the summer of 2001 (the same day I did). At the time of this story they had already been working on Safari for over a year, the point was that in that meeting they realized that Alexander was less than an additional 6 months away from shipping. Not to discount the work of the kHTML guys, but it was more than a year of work to get from kHTML to Webkit.
- SimHacker 14y agoAt Maxis, we didn't arrive at the totally obvious name The Sims until very late in development. At first there was the secret development name, Project X, but everybody had a Project X, and we certainly couldn't ship with that. Then there was Jamie's obvious name, Dollhouse, which was quite descriptive, but boys would hate it. Then there was Will's quirky name, Super Happy Friends Home, which only the Japanese would love. Then there was Jim's high minded name, Jefferson, for the pursuit of happiness, but it made everybody think of the sitcom The Jeffersons. Then there was the legendary perfectly descriptive catchy epic name, that everyone on the team really loved, which we dreamed up together in a brainstorming session when we were all quite stoned, but by the next day we all forgot it, and nobody could ever remember what it was again, although we could all distinctly remember the warm glow of knowing that it was the best possible name in the world, which everyone would love. Those were good times! ;) But for some reason, during all that time, despite racking our brains, nobody ever though of "The Sims", which is retrospect was a totally obvious name for a continuation of the SimCity franchise focusing on the people in the city. (The original SimCity manual referred to the people in the city as "the Sims," so there was a long standing precedent.) I have no idea who eventually came up with the name The Sims, and I'm happy with it, but it definitely wasn't the perfect name that everybody forgot. It's lost in the sands of time...
- philbo 14y agoThis bit surprised me somewhat: 'Not only had we gotten very used to calling it that, the string “Alexander” was all over the code and buried in its resources. So the engineering team wasn’t just curious about the real name, they were worried about correctly and completely changing the placeholder name at the last minute.' Why would you litter a codebase with disparate string literals referring to a "placeholder name" rather than using a single resource file or a single #define?
- bni 14y agoWhat makes you think it was string literals? Probably a lot of classes was prefixed with "Alex" or something similar. Folks at Apple, being perfectionists, of course could not live with the code name all over the source :-)
- bdash 14y agoResources such as nib files and help files aren't amenable to things like #defines. Filenames and build system metadata fall in to the same cateogry. The source code proper is a different story, but is also trivially updateable via sed or the like.
- jballanc 14y agoJust for some perspective, in my time at Apple "It doesn't suck" was usually the highest form of praise possible.
- nicholassmith 14y agoI've read that a few times in places, which is interesting on the face of it as in public the language surrounding Apple products is hyperbolic and overwhelmingly positive, and internally saying "well, it doesn't suck" is high praise. The duality of company presences.
- lloeki 14y ago"All [names] suck. This one just sucks less" [0] I guess at some point one intellectually reaches a no-return state where due to some Dunning-Kruger corollary you find everything you do sucks to various degrees. It follows that "it's brilliant" is much less impacting than "it doesn't suck" since the former, while authentic, may feel shallower in the reasoning that led to it. [0]: http://www.mutt.org http://www.mutt.org
- RaSoJo 14y agoAncient powerful or mythical cities here. ElDorado, Hamunaptra, Babylon, etc.
- Syssiphus 14y agoIBrowse would have been a bad choice. There is an Amiga OS Browser which goes by that name, and it is a little bit older than Safari. http://www.ibrowse-dev.net/ http://www.ibrowse-dev.net/
- nikcub 14y agothere was also a Cisco product called iPhone
- xsace 14y agofree-DOM, it's actually a clever name
- brudgers 14y agoBased on no evidence whatsoever, just an intuition about Jobs, I would not be surprised if the point of reference was Surfin' Safari - the Beach Boys song. It is free from the negative connotations of a reference to Africa and consistent with the sort of Californian to which Jobs aspired. Apple was funded by a VW microbus after all. The play on surfing is consistent with Apple's image of how consumers should be oriented to use their products.
- icodestuff 14y agoI always assumed that was it. Ironically, I haven't heard anyone say "surfing the web" since Safari came out.
- emehrkay 14y agoI feel like I am pretty good at naming things (I dont think about it for too long, if that matters). Describe to me a product and I'll name it for you.
- natem345 14y agoAn app that lets your remotely control monitor on/off & sleep/hibernate/shutdown/wake your PC.
- leonsp 14y agoA thingie that's mostly white with a blinking stick on it where if you hit the keyboard letters show up, and you can make some letters thicker and some slanted in a weird way.
- emehrkay 14y agoMinder
- bengoodger 14y agoProduct naming can be ridiculously hard. Even if you have something you personally think is clever, everyone else can think you're a dork. Related anecdotes: When trying to come up with a name for Firefox (after having two other names rejected due to trademark snafus), a friend of mine sarcastically rattled off a bunch of alternatives using the same prefix as the outgoing "Firebird" on IRC one night. I think it was "Firecrap, Fireturd, Firefox". I stopped him. The consonance was great, and the team loved the name. The rest is history. At the beginning of Chrome, we had to come up with a project name. Inspired how Netscape did their project naming, we did a vote. The results were truly awful. I think "Goose" was the winner. At this point Linus came in and put us out of our misery, "How about Chrome... it's kind of ironic given the UI design." Everyone agreed that it was much better. That was before we'd written really any code, so it stuck for the entire project. Shortly before launch the marketing folk did a brief exploration, but we threw up all over their suggestions, and Chrome stuck.
- nacker 14y agoI had been a Phoenix user for several months when I heard it had run into problems with the name. When I heard it was going to be called Firefox, I thought it was the most ridiculous name I'd ever heard! Funny, now I really like it. When I first heard the name Barack, though... http://rense.com/general84/brck.htm http://rense.com/general84/brck.htm
- bluesmoon 14y agoI always thought it came from the Hindi word Safari, which translates to Traveller or Explorer (Safar is a Journey). I personally codename my projects pffft.
- happimess 14y agoAccording to etymonline[1], it comes from Arabic through Swahili. [1]http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=safari&searchmode=none http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&s...
- hughw 14y agoOh the irony, that Safari on my MBP has a rendering bug, probably acceleration related, that truncates the text in the sixth paragraph.
- McP 14y agoIt was a poor choice of name in that it gives no hint as to what the application might actually do. While on holiday and in need of some internet, a (highly intelligent) friend searched around the local town and could only found a Mac in a hotel lobby. Despite being very motivated she was unable to persuade it to open a browser and eventually gave up and was left wondering how Macs could possibly be described as intuitive or user friendly.
- eridius 14y agoAnd "Firefox" and "Chrome" are sensible names?
- habitue 14y agoAh, now "Internet Explorer" there's a name! What does it do? Explores the Internet of course!
- eridius 14y agoI still have a fondness for the name "Netscape Navigator". It seems a shame that we never started using the term "netscape" to refer to the internet.
- pavel_lishin 14y agoI'm so used to Netscape being a brand name, it took me at least ten seconds to break the word up into its constituent words, and understand what you meant.
- kragen 14y agoThere were people who did ("You can see my new page on netscape!") but maybe not in the way you're thinking. At the time (1994) we all called the browser "Netscape", once we got used to not calling it "Mozilla".
- msgilligan 14y agoI remember when Safari was very buggy in its early versions and some folks within Apple had taken to calling it "So Sorry". I had several bug reports on a web app my company had developed for Apple that turned out to be Safari bugs. They were fixed rather rapidly, which is what would finally convince my contacts that it definitely wasn't a bug in our web app. "So Sorry" they said...