9 ms·
Keeping Safari a secret
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- IheartApplesDix 14y agoThe article doesn't really say why they needed to keep Safari a secret. I guess Apple just has a culture of secrecy.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- laurent123456 14y ago> We couldn’t ship with the real Safari user agent string disabled, but we came up with the next best thing — automatically enabling it after a certain date. Does that mean that if you set the date of your computer back before 2003, the user agent will become Internet Explorer?
- donmelton 14y agoIf you were able to run a copy of Safari version 48, it would probably look like a Gecko-based browser before this date.
- laurent123456 14y agoBut he seems to be saying that the code that enables this is still in Safari.
- ryannielsen 14y agoI suggest you look at the author of the comment to which you replied, and compare his name to the author of the article…
- bdash 14y agov38. You'd not see it with v48.
- barredo 14y agoI just tried with Safari 6 on Mountain Lion and it does not. Obviously this must have been a feature of Safari 1.0
- donmelton 14y agoYes, only the original version of Safari.
- nsp 14y agoDoes anyone know why Apple stopped doing this(or stopped doing it as thoroughly)? With the possible exception of the original, sites have consistently reported visits from iOS/iPhone:iPad user agents (and claimed that the ip originated within apple) well before launch. Recent example: http://thenextweb.com/apple/2013/01/01/developers-begin-seeing-new-apple-iphone-hardware-and-ios-7-in-usage-logs/ http://thenextweb.com/apple/2013/01/01/developers-begin-seei...
- markrages 14y agoI'm guessing it's not a secret or surprise to anyone that Apple would work on a new version of their operating system, nor that such operating system would include a browser. Safari, on the other hand, was unexpected.
- robmcm 14y agoAlso, what were the chances that someone would even notice "Safari" in their log files had it of slipped out, vs some stats company who only work on iPhones noticing a new iPhone version. Apple 10 years ago < Apple now
- Tloewald 14y agoApple was big news in the tech industry even at its nadir. To quote (roughly from memory) BYTE in 1994 -- the history of the computer industry over the last ten years has consisted of following Apple.
- nirvana 14y agoThat Apple makes the iPhone and iPad is not a secret. The article you link to is talking about stats that apps are reporting over the internet... the apps have to know what kind of device they are running on, and have to be able to handle differences between the devices (eg: the screen difference between the iPhone 4S and iPhone 5). No real information is released with these hardware model numbers that's not already reasonably known. The only exception is for devices that people might think are end of life, or unlikely to get a refresh soon. For instance, the Mac Pro may start showing up in logs, and that would be news, because it is so rarely updated... or it would be news if Tim Cook hadn't said that they planned to release an update (in 2013? not sure when he said it would be.) So, knowing that iOS 7 (8, 9, etc.) are under development doesn't give away any of the secrets-- eg: what the special features of those OSes will be.
- zalew 14y agoTLDR: for whatever reasons it was a very top-secret project, so they spoofed the user agent, the end.
- gry 14y agoThe interesting story is Apple. We're hearing about it now.
- jmspring 14y agoSometimes the backstory makes for a fun read. Looking for the cliff notes version all the time makes life boring.
- donmelton 14y agoThank you. That was my whole reason for writing it. :)
- bitcartel 14y agoWhat are your thoughts on the present and future for Safari? It appears Safari for Windows is all but dead, with no mention of it on Apple's website. Meanwhile Chrome's adoption has been stellar. http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
- donmelton 14y agoI'm not going to comment on the present and future of Safari and WebKit. I'm retired. I have no business doing that. And it would disrespect the fine people at Apple -- my friends -- who are still working on both.
- robmcm 14y agoYou are lucky no one changed their system clock for testing before launch! Then again it doesn't seem Apple do that very often, cough Do not disturb cough ;)
- georgemcbay 14y ago"Which explains why the Safari user agent string has so much extra information in it, e.g. KHTML, like Gecko — the names of other browser engines." Wasn't Safari/WebKit largely based on KHTML in the beginning? This doesn't say it wasn't, but seems to imply that there was a separation of the two that was more complete than it really was. I realize the OP is in a better position than I to know exactly what the reasoning here was, but it seems like reporting yourself as KHTML when you are largely based on the KHTML rendering engine would just be a sensible and practical thing to do outside of all this cloak and dagger stuff. (Granted, I doubt there were very many websites, if any at all, that gave a rat's ass about special cases for KHTML compatibility).
- guptaneil 14y agoThat is exactly what he is saying. They added KHTML to the user agent string to improve compatibility with servers, since Webkit was essentially KHTML anyway, not to try to hide the actual user agent. Internet Explorer is what they used when hiding the user agent.
- georgemcbay 14y agoIf he is trying to say that, then he has my sincere apologies, but it doesn't read like that, at least to me. eg. he says "the names of other browser engines", not "the name of the browser engine our code was originally based on". The "like Gecko" part is a bit of a red herring here and mostly irrelevant, as that is simply what KHTML/Konquerer used in its own UA ("KHTML, like Gecko").
- guptaneil 14y agoThe full quote is: "That allowed me to tweak the string for maximum compatibility with the websites of that time. Which explains why the Safari user agent string has so much extra information in it, e.g. KHTML, like Gecko — the names of other browser engines." I interpret that as KHTML and Gecko are names of other browser engines that are listed in Safari's user agent string for compatibility purposes.
- cpeterso 14y agoIf they were worried about server admins correlating Apple's IP addresses with a new User-Agent string, the team could have VPN'd to a non-Apple network to access the web.
- laurent123456 14y agoI guess they were worried both about having recognizable IP addresses AND having the name of their new browser appear in logs all around the world. The user agent was something like "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; sv-se) AppleWebKit/85.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/85.5", which people would have quickly correlated to Apple, not matter what IP it came from.
- donmelton 14y agoThe string was originally just contained "WebKit." When it became "AppleWebKit" in mid-December (as I recall) then, yes, it was more likely to be discovered. But I felt that a 17.x.x.x address would be the clincher and the secret would be out.
- duopixel 14y agoI distinctly remember how the web dev world (myself included) groaned at the prospect of supporting another rendering engine. Gecko was clearly the best browser at the time, and the choice of KHTML seemed bizarre, to say the least. Even the intention of Apple building it's own web browser seemed weird, Apple had failed at a previous homebrewed browser (Cyberdog), why not just build on top of what Mozilla had already done? I remember Apple stating that Konqueror's code was much more leaner, faster and modern. I've always wondered if the birth of Safari was an early sign that Apple was interested in developing the pieces missing for an internet device. Safari seemed like a godsend foresight from Apple when they released the iPhone, but I can't help wonder if it was planned this way all along.
- donmelton 14y agoI would love to claim the foresight of planning for the iPhone all along. Alas, that was not the case. :) For any of us. We built our own browser because we didn't want to depend on another company for a critical application. We built our own browser engine because we wanted to use the technology in more things than a browser. We built that engine small and fast because Bertrand Serlet would have shot me if I had done otherwise. :) You have to remember that Mac OS X itself was smaller in those days. Not iOS small, but considerably smaller that it is now. After the initial success of Mac Safari, there was a time when I was second-guessed by some for choosing KHTML and KJS as the basis for WebKit. When we decided to do the iPhone, I was suddenly a genius again. :) That's just the way it works in the real world.
- jiggy2011 14y agoInteresting, I wonder if it would be possible to start a rumour by having a number of people spoof their user-agent string? Sure , they wouldn't route back to an Apple IP address but then who's to say Apple doesn't browse via proxy/vpn somewhere?
- Tloewald 14y agoNo-one would credit rumors that Apple was wasting its time creating a new browser.
- sxp 14y ago>Back around 1990, some forward-thinking IT person secured for Apple an entire Class A network of IP addresses. I found that fact to be the most interesting part of the article. The list of other Class A holders is also interesting: http://www.aturtschi.com/whois/neta1.html http://www.aturtschi.com/whois/neta1.html
- 1amzave 14y agoIndeed -- also interesting are the results of an RDNS query on the first IP address listed in the article (17.149.160.49).
- davvid 14y agoBack around 1990, some forward-thinking IT person secured for Apple an entire Class A network of IP addresses. Pixar has a large block too... I wonder if Steve had something to do with it?
- jdechko 14y agoI knew that going in, but only because of this: http://xkcd.com/195/ http://xkcd.com/195/
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Raz0rblade 14y agomust have been easier to use an ip filter and base the identifier on ip... duh..
- to3m 14y agoA device behind a router might be unable to reliably determine its outward-facing IP.
- smackfu 14y agoThis blog is revealing more interesting tidbits from inside Apple than the official biographer of Steve Jobs. How sad is that?
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoQuite sad, but not honestly surprising. That was a biography made to be mainstream, to tell the general public how glorious Steve supposedly was.
- petemc_ 14y agoI take it you didn't read it.
- mbreckon 14y agoDon, would you be willing to share a bit in future posts about how you grew the team, how you organised yourselves and how that changed over the course of the project? Also, what thought process did you go through in the decision of how much to include in V1.0 vs leave to later releases? As a team lead/product manager I'm always interested in hearing other people's experiences, and your experience and writing style put you in a better place than many to do that. It is the thought processes and the dynamics of interacting with others in an organisation that make software development stories interesting.
- JohnFromBuffalo 14y agoThis still makes me think that Ninjas work at Apple. How other can they evade such a public part of the interwebs? http://www.askaninja.com/ http://www.askaninja.com/ I guess.
- astrange 14y agoWhat a nicely transparent spam post.
- jagermo 14y agoThis seems like an insane waste of resources just to keep a secret. Did this get you in any programming troubles in the long term?