Ovidiu Predescu's Weblog

Safari and Chimera

The rumors about Apple releasing its own branded browser circulated for some months now. With the hiring of David Hyatt at Apple, one of the main developers of Chimera and Mozilla, the expectation was the new browser will be based on Gecko. It now turns out Safari is based on Konqueror's rendering engine. Quite interesting!

It would be very interesting to see the evolution of Safari. One major feature missing from Safari is tabbed browsing, which was designed and implemented by David. His description of the story and how it was seen by marketing people at that time is rather amusing.

What are the long term implications for Mozilla of Apple's decision to go without Gecko? With the current polarization of developers around Apple's new MacOS X, is Mozilla going to loose its relevance as the "other" browser on the market? Can Apple fight this browser battle they've just entered? What will be Microsoft's response to this?

I think this year will be an interesting one to watch...