History and development

Until 1997, Apple Macintosh computers had shipped with Netscape Navigator only. Microsoft's Internet Explorer for Mac was subsequently included as the default web browser as part of the five year agreement between Apple and Microsoft. However, Netscape Navigator continued to be included. Microsoft released five major versions of Internet Explorer for Mac, with the last one being released on March 27, 2000.

On January 7, 2003, Steve Jobs announced that Apple had developed their own web browser based on KHTML rendering engine, called Safari.[5] They released the first beta version that day and a number of official and unofficial beta versions followed, until version 1.0 was released on June 23, 2003. Available as a separate download initially, it was included with the Mac OS X v10.3 release on October 24, 2003, as the default browser, with Internet Explorer for Mac included only as an alternative browser. Since the release of Mac OS X v10.4 in April 29, 2005, Safari is the only web browser included with the operating system.

Safari uses Apple's WebKit for rendering web pages and running JavaScript. WebKit consists of WebCore (based on Konqueror's KHTML engine) and JavaScriptCore (based on KDE's JavaScript engine named KJS). Like KHTML and KJS, WebCore and JavaScriptCore are free software and are released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License. Some Apple improvements to the KHTML code are merged back into the Konqueror project. Apple also releases additional code under an open source 2-clause BSD-like license.

In June 2005, after some criticism from KHTML developers over lack of access to change logs, Apple moved the development source code and bug tracking of WebCore and JavaScriptCore to OpenDarwin.org. WebKit itself was also released as open source. The source code for non-renderer aspects of the browser, such as its GUI elements, remains proprietary.

Version 2.0 of Safari, released on April 29, 2005 and which runs only on Mac OS X 10.4.x (Tiger) or later, includes a built in RSS and Atom reader. Other features include Private Browsing (a mode in which no record of information about the user's web activity is retained), the ability to archive and e-mail web pages, the ability to search bookmarks, and a reported 1.8x speed boost over version 1.2.4.

In April 2005, Dave Hyatt, one of the Safari developers at Apple, documented his progress fixing bugs in Safari to get it to pass the Acid2 test. On April 27, 2005, he announced that his development version of Safari now passed the test, making it the first web browser to do so.[6] The changes were not initially available to end-users unless they downloaded and compiled the WebKit source code themselves or ran one of the nightly automated builds available at opendarwin.org.[7] However on October 31, 2005, Apple released version 2.0.2 of Safari that included the Acid2 bug fixes.

On January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs formally announced Apple's iPhone, which uses the Safari browser.

At the 2007 Worldwide Developers Conference, Steve Jobs announced Safari 3 for Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Vista. The beta version of Safari 3 now works with Google Docs & Spreadsheets and allows for rich formatting in Gmail, both of which were unavailable on earlier versions of Safari even though Safari has had rich formatting since version 1.3. Safari 3 extends on this as well as making it more stable (it is still possible to crash Safari via multiple undos as of beta 3.0.2). The Safari beta version for Windows had several known bugs[8] and a zero day exploit that allows remote execution, upon its initial beta release on June 11, 2007, in version 3.0.[9] The addressed bugs were then corrected by Apple three days later on June 14, 2007, in version 3.0.1 on Windows. On June 22, 2007, Apple released Safari 3.0.2 to address some bugs, performance issues and other security issues. Safari 3.0.2 for Windows address some fonts that are missing in the browser but already installed on your computer, such as Tahoma, Trebuchet MS, and others. The software will run in WINE if this guide is used [10] At the announcement Apple claimed that Safari is the fastest browser and to prove this Steve Jobs ran a benchmark based on the iBench browser test suite, live at the show. Later tests have shown that Safari seems to cut corners especially when it comes to the onload event and page scrolling[11], which is in fact caused by WebKit emitting onload before the rendering has finished. It is unknown if this is intentional but multiple comments in the source code referring to the iBench test show that they at least optimized specifically for the iBench test.

On September 5, 2007, Apple announced iPod touch, which uses the Safari browser.

CSS Support

Safari has solid support for CSS, including partial support of CSS3.[12] Safari 3 supports several experimental properties like text-shadow, text-stroke, box-shadow, border-image, multiple backgrounds for each element, resizeable elements, rgba() and the CSS3 pseudo-element :first-of-type.