My immediate instinct was to agree with you.

But my main question is this -- why did they use Konqueror instead of Mozilla/Gecko? I don't know if we can second-guess the move unless we know the motivations behind it.

I've used Konqueror infrequently, but I suspect that if it was significantly different from IE and Mozilla, people wouldn't use it because sites wouldn't work for them.

-Posted by Joe Grossberg on January 8, 2003 11:17 AM

I'm guessing the main reason they went with KHTML (which I believe is no longer used by Konquerer) is that Gecko is ultimately under the control of AOL. Also, the Gecko community is much larger than the KHTML one so there is more political risk for Apple when they embrace/extend it (even when they release source).

Unfortunately I no longer have a running Mac so I can't check it out, but if "hardcore standards compliance" is the goal, then supporting it won't be a big deal. I am slowly moving towards using Mozilla as my base development browser because it is more picky about standards than IE, so I can write code to spec and it will likely work on both (scripting not included in that statement).

-Posted by Eric on January 8, 2003 12:02 PM

Actually, according to an email sent to/from a KDE dev list, they went with Konqueror's KHTML core because it was only 140,000 lines of code - small compared to, and here I'm paraphrasing Apple's Safari page, "another open source browser renderer." I assume they mean Gecko. So size was the main issue concerned.

-Posted by Phil on January 8, 2003 12:35 PM

Yeah, size was the main reason that I heard too - and although they didn't mention Mozilla/Gecko by name, you just know that's what they were referring to.

My biggest beef is that since we'll all have to support this thing, we'll have to test our sites in it - which is pretty hard to do, considering that I don't have easy access to a Mac. Sure, my parents have one, but that's not as easy as just launching Mozilla on my own machine.

Maybe there is a market for G4 emulators for Windows?

-Posted by milbertus on January 8, 2003 06:03 PM

I've been using it... the speed amazes me compared to everything else I've tried on OSX... It's replaced omniweb as my default now that I got that stupid metallic skin turned off.

It would be nice if it had a context menu though... if a picture doesn't load, for example, it seems you have to reload the entire page.

-Posted by JC on January 10, 2003 11:23 AM

The thing is it's fast, renders HTML, XHTML, CSS very well, and there's already a handful of Gecko browsers out there. Apple's in the buisness of being different. We don't really need another Gecko browser --- slooooowwww.

I've been using Safari as my default browser for a couple of days now and am really enjoying it. I think Apple's done the right thing here on this one. It's the simplest, fastest, most intutive browser I've found -- I currently have IE, NS, Mozilla, Chimera, OmniWeb, and Opera on my drive -- feel the need to test for those who measure a significant number on our site visitor's list.

As for supporting Safari, well, just code to the standards and you'll be just fine.

-Posted by on January 10, 2003 03:49 PM

Safari Browser Detection

All the gecko-based browsers (Netscape, Mozilla, etc.) have the word "gecko" in their USER_AGENT, so all you have to do is lowercase the USER_AGENT string and check for the little lizard word.

The Safari folks were kind enough to add "gecko" to their USER_AGENT, so no additional browser detection is neccesary . Checking for "gecko" is also more scalable for the forseeable future, because eventually, checking for "mozilla/5" won't cover all the gecko browsers.

Safari's HTTP_USER_AGENT usually looks something like: "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/48 (like Gecko) Safari/48"

(Now if only they'd get rid of that hideous brushed-metal skin, I might actually use it more than IE. It's bad enough that I have to look at that metal crap in iTunes!)

-Posted by Hambiscuit Chickenugget on March 4, 2003 07:41 PM