Simon Willison’s Weblog

Safari surprise

7th January 2003

I dunno, you take the evening off to watch a daft Bond movie (Goldeneye was showing on ITV) and when you log on again the world is aflame with reports of Apple’s new browser, Safari. To everyone’s surprise it’s based on the KHTML engine as seen in Konqueror, rather than using Mozilla’s Gecko engine. I’ve used Konqueror a fair bit in the past few months and it really is an excellent rendering engine (I was amazed when it rendered all of my favourite CSS layout sites flawlessly) but this is still something of a shock, especially considering Apple’s recent hiring of Dave Hyatt, a key member of the Mozilla project and the guy behind the excellent Gecko-based browser Chimera.

Mark Pilgrim appears to have the most in depth review of the browser so far (alas I lack an Apple Mac to play with new toys like this), but coverage is also available from Craig Saila, Jim Winstead, Scott Andrew, Leonard Lin and Mena Trott.