Safari is a web browser developed by Apple Inc. and included in Mac OS X. It was first released as a public beta on January 7, 2003, and is the default browser in Mac OS X v10.3 and later. A beta version for Microsoft Windows was released for the first time on June 11, 2007 with support for Windows XP and Windows Vista, although it was also functional, albeit unofficially, on Windows 2000. Safari has also been run unofficially on Linux under Wine, but the graphical user interface (GUI) and web graphics do not render properly.

Since the release of Safari, its browser usage share has been climbing. For the month of May 2006, thecounter.com shows that Safari has a usage share of 2.86%; NetApplications.com reports that Safari has a usage share of 4.59% as of April 2007, an increase of 1.33 percentage points since May 2006.

Features

Safari has a bookmark management scheme that functions like the iTunes jukebox software, integrates Apple's QuickTime multimedia technology, and features a tabbed-browsing interface. A web search box is a standard component of the Safari interface, as are software services that automatically fill out web forms, manage passwords via Keychain and spell check entries into web page text fields. The browser also includes an integrated pop-up ad blocker. Also from Apple is the Web Inspector - a DOM Inspector-like utility that lets users and developers browse the Document Object Model of a web page.

The web search box uses Google on the Mac platform, and either Google or Yahoo! on the Windows operating system.

Safari also features expandable text entry boxes, allowing the user to resize the entry box, making large text entry easier.

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. 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. Existing 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 extra code under an open source 2-clause BSD-like license.Safari showing the RSS feed of this article's revision history.

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, was released on April 29, 2005 and runs only on Mac OS X 10.4.x (Tiger) or later. It 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 1.8 times 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. 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. However on October 31, 2005, Apple released version 2.0.2 of Safari that included the Acid2 bug fixes.Windows XP using the Public Beta 3 version of Safari. The "bug" icon can be seen adjacent to the address bar, used for reporting errors and problems in the browser.

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 and allows for rich formatting in Gmail, both of which were unavailable on earlier versions of Safari although Safari has had rich formatting since version 1.3. Safari 3 extends on this as well as making it more stable. The Safari beta version for Windows had several known bugs and a zero day exploit that allows remote execution, upon its initial beta release on June 11, 2007, in version 3.0. 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 handles 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. The present released windows beta is version 3.0.4 (523.15).

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. External measurement of Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) load times confirm that Safari is the fastest browser on the Windows platform in terms of initial data loading over the Internet, but is tied with Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox when comparing loading from caches.

Safari is the native browser on the Apple iPhone and iPod touch.

CSS support

Safari has solid and standards-compliant support for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), including partial support of CSS3. 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.

Version history

Note the version may be reported differently in the "About Safari" function than those reported below for the WebKit. The initial Mac OS X v10.5 "Leopard" release version of Safari is 3.0.4 (5523.10) where the same version below is reported as 3.0.4. 523.10.3.

1.0 and 2.0

3.0

Safari 3.0 for Windows