Talk:Safari (web browser)

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Contents 1 Free software? 2 Icon 3 Not Gecko 4 How proprietary? 5 Criticism about Safari's new HTML elements 6 Standards support 7 Disappearing underlining in Safari 8 Disappearing "|" signs in category sections in Safari 9 Screenshot of Safari 10 Nightly builds 11 Proposed move (capitalization) 12 Version history? 13 Rumors of a Win32 version?

[edit] Free software?

Sorry don't have much time to check this stuff up, but IIRC Safari itself is not free software... {{unsigned|131.170.97.53]] 03:17, 18 February 2003

It is, in fact. [1] -- Revived 23:46, 19 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Looks to me that the it is just about as free as Internet Explorer (assuming you want the new pop-up blocker and security stuff), that is you upgrade OS X so you can get a better browser. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 151.198.9.53 (talk • contribs). 05:02, 18 January 2005

i.e. not Free at all. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 82.32.46.112 (talk • contribs). 17:57, 18 October 2005

No. Free software is that one that can be freely modified, redistributed, etc. Since source code of Safari is not freely available, it can't be a free software. --minghong 15:37, 27 July 2005 (UTC)

Safari itself is not free software, however WebCore based on KHTML, the main library that Safari uses, is free software. Dread Lord CyberSkull ✎☠ 13:22, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Icon

I wonder do we really want to the icon of Safari in the article? -- Taku 01:26 18 May 2003 (UTC)

Why don't we? - Daniel Pritchard 08:21, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

I don't know, but my guess is that Taku isn't going to be coming back 3 years later to answer that question ;) —bbatsell ¿? 08:24, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

Lol. Didn't notice. Wouldn't it be funny if he did, though? -- Daniel Pritchard 20:42, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Not Gecko

The non-use of Gecko seems tangential. Do we really need it? And even though a link is provided, the "bloat" explanation seems somewhat POV and/or speculative. For example, does the question of whether Gecko is or is not "well developed" need to be discussed here (I agree Gecko is good; but for some other page). Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters

Another well developed open source layout engine Gecko (of the Mozilla browser) was not chosen. It was suggested that software bloating was probably one of the reasons [2]. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters (talk • contribs). 19:30, 18 May 2005

[edit] How proprietary?

User:Rhobite seems to have an axe to grind about calling Safari "proprietary" in the lead sentence. S/he suggested this was a better parallel with the IE article. Grammatically, that much is true, but there's no need for each web browser's page to follow the same grammatical template (and other browsers' pages start slightly differently from either).

As to the proprietary issue, it's really just explained better in the "History and development" section. The single word characterization is not particularly accurate. Likewise, I would take out an initial comment that described Safari as Free Software in a blanket way. In fact, Safari has some free elements (the rendering engine, Webkit, etc); and it has some proprietary elements (the GUI). My understanding is that there is no analogous Free Software portion of IE; but I haven't contributed to the IE article, and if I'm wrong, that fact belongs over there, not here.

Overall though, getting exactly the right word or two describing the license status need not occur in the first sentence. It's better left in the section that explains this in more detail. Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters 15:39, 2005 July 27 (UTC)

I have an axe to grind about the double standards on Wikipedia. Safari and IE are both proprietary software, and it isn't a gray area thing. I can't compile Safari, I can't modify it, and I can't redistribute it. It's true that some of the libraries are open source, but I don't feel that this makes Safari "less proprietary" than IE. Although IE is entirely closed-source, there is an extensive API for customizing and extending the browser (and installing annoying weather toolbars, heh).

My main point is that our bias shows through here. Attempts to remove the word "proprietary" from the IE article have been reverted, and attempts to add the word "proprietary" to the Safari article have also been reverted. All I want to do is illustrate the double standard, the pervasive anti-Microsoft bias around here. Rhobite 03:44, August 5, 2005 (UTC)

Axe or not, the facts Rhobite purports are simply not true. Whatever "point" s/he wants to make is counter to WP policy (Wikipedia:Don't disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point). The rendering engine for IE is not, AFAIK, free software. The rendering engine for Safari is free software. We all agree that Safari is neither wholly free nor entirely proprietary, but rather some mixture. I think no part of IE is similarly free (but I could be wrong; if so, put that fact in the IE article, not here).

The meaning of Free Software is quite clear. And some significant percentage of the code in Safari qualifies. Obviously, since I haven't seen the proprietary parts, I can't say if that's 50% free, or 80% free, or 90% free (though I read about someone who made an extremely Safari-like wrapper around Webcore with fairly small effort; but I have not investigated that project in any detail). It is equally clear that an open API, while perhaps desirable as well, does not Free Software make (though perhaps you could edit the IE article to describe it as "proprietary software with an open API"; assuming such is true). Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters 04:18, 2005 August 5 (UTC)

The facts I "purport" are not true? Please point me to where I can download the GUI to Safari, then. Please inform me when Safari will be ported and included with Debian. Thanks in advance. Rhobite 04:29, August 5, 2005 (UTC)

Are you familiar with Cocoa development? The GUI is in a bunch of files that end with the extension ".nib". One way to access them is by right-clicking on the Safari icon and selecting "Show Package Contents". Nothing stops you from doing whatever you want with the GUI. Safari was updated with the latest update that was released with 10.4.x so that may include a copy of them. AlistairMcMillan 05:28, August 5, 2005 (UTC)

Look, I know ranting about a point is fun. But this is just utterly silly. Your claim makes about as much sense as wanting to insert the description "proprietary" into the WP pages on the Red Hat or Suse Linux distributions. Heck, for that matter into the desciption of the Debian distribution (which includes a non-free directory right there on the ISO image). FWIW, I'm pretty sure that FreeBSD includes no non-free binaries on its standard ISO images. Ubuntu seems pretty strictly free, though they might have thrown in some non-free driver of the like. In real life, a lot of software combines free and non-free portions.

If it were up to me, Apple would open the source for the non-free parts of Safari. And MS would open source all of IE. And Novell would open source the few non-free parts of Suse (actually, they've made steps in that direction). For the most part, it's not up to me; and I'm not going to edit WP pages to make some trite and hyper-didactic point about non-free parts of mostly free software. Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters 04:42, 2005 August 5 (UTC)

Hey, take a look at this. It's a list of software based on Webkit. See where it says that Safari is open source? Neither do I! Actually, Safari is "commercial" software according to OpenDarwin (and they should know, many of them helped write it). Got a Mac? Go click Help->License in Safari. What's that you see? Pages of fine print, and it ain't the LGPL. Let's read some quotes from "Apple Computer, Inc. Software License Agreement for SAFARI":

This License allows you to install and use one copy of the Apple Software on a single computer at a time.

This License does not allow the Apple Software to exist on more than one computer at a time, and you may not make the Apple Software available over a network where it could be used by multiple computers at the same time.

Except as and only to the extent expressly permitted in this License or by applicable law, you may not decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, modify or create derivative works of the Apple Software or any part thereof

"Mostly free", indeed. Safari is a web browser. I'm not talking about Webkit, I'm not talking about KHTML. Those are just libraries. The browser is proprietary and closed-source. Rhobite 05:01, August 5, 2005 (UTC)

Two things. The guy that wrote that page on OpenDarwin (Dstorey) doesn't work for Apple. And ownership has nothing to do with it. If I write a piece of "free software" and release it under the GPL I still own it, so whether it is completely owned by Apple or not is completely irrelevant. AlistairMcMillan 05:47, August 5, 2005 (UTC)

Thanks, I have clarified my statement. Your responses avoid my main point though, which is that Apple's license confirms that Safari is indeed proprietary software. Agreed? Rhobite 06:59, August 5, 2005 (UTC)

Agree? Nope. You keep referring to the proprietary part, the GUI. A web browser is a lot more than just a GUI. You can't just discount the part that renders pages, etc. Safari is partially proprietary and partially free. BTW You seem to be attaching your own POV to the phrases "free software" and "proprietary". Why is describing Internet Explorer as a proprietary piece of software a negative thing? AlistairMcMillan 07:17, August 5, 2005 (UTC)

Also I'm assuming you know that if you click on Help->Acknowledgment, Safari will pop open a copy of the GPL? AlistairMcMillan 07:19, August 5, 2005 (UTC)

Actually, the LGPL. But AlistiarMcMillion is 100% correct that Safari is "part free software and part proprietary"... just like the Debian GNU/Linux distribution is :-). Just like all-proprietary IE is not. Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters 08:32, 2005 August 5 (UTC)

[edit] Criticism about Safari's new HTML elements

I just recently (sep 2005) found out that the Safari team has inplemented some proprietary HTML elements and values, primarily for use with Safari 2's RSS reader and the dashboard application, wich uses WebCore. I saw some discussions and blogentries about it ([3], [4]).

One example of Safari-only HTML can be found on Apples Dashboard widget site, [5]. If you use a newer Safari, you can see a search field on the page that is styled like the one in iTunes. This is <input type="search">. It seems that the page uses serverside browsersniffing to feed this to Safari only. Of course, the input-search-element doesn't validate at W3C.

I beleive this is of interest, since Safari is doing something that IE and NS did a while ago - inventing their own nonstandard HTML-elements, like marquee and blink. I think this should be adressed in the Safari article since other browsers has received a lot of criticism about this, but few users and even few developers seems to know about Safaris home-made tags.

Has anyone any more info on these tags/values? Anyone knows wether Apple implemented a special namespace or DTD? I know only from one year old blog entries...

// s4ndp4pper 20050911

I'm not really sure how this ended up in the end, but you do get that this is different from Microsoft/Netscape's actions in the past? Apple publicly announced they wanted to add tags and asked for comments, which is what you linked to above, before releasing a product that used their new tags. Anyway probably a good idea to find out how this ended up and add it to either the Safari page, the WebCore page or the WebKit page. AlistairMcMillan 21:40, 11 September 2005 (UTC)

Just noticed by accident that the <canvas> element is available in Firefox 1.5 and is part of the Web Applications 1.0 working draft. [6] AlistairMcMillan 05:06, 12 September 2005 (UTC)

Of course, Apple has been very open about their intentions and has listened to the likes of Eric Meyer, and that's a very humble move. But there was a discussion about wether these functions should use it's own namespace or DTD to work, like IBM did with their own XHTML. I saw the line "They (the Safari team) should hang their heads in shame" a couple of times in the blogs... My point is that is a controversial move (to some), and although it's not very probable, some web developers could start making Safari-only webpage features. (Well OK, it's just a searchfield and that canvas thingy etc...)

Myself, I think it's great that HTML/XHTML evolves. // s4ndp4pper 20050912 10.58

[edit] Standards support

An anon recently added detail on Safari's Atom support. To me it seemed out of place, when we don't go into detail on Safari's support for any other standard. If no one else gets to it before me, I'll add a section on exactly which standards are supported some time soon. AlistairMcMillan 13:28, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Disappearing underlining in Safari

(I apologize if this is an inappropriate place to ask, but...) Today, all of a sudden, the underlining for links disappeared when I viewed Wikipedia with Safari (unless the mouse cursor is over the link). Anybody with any ideas what happened and how I can reverse this? --Nlu 04:52, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

I figured it out -- added a couple lines to my monobook.css file and that solved it. Still annoying -- why was this change made? --Nlu 06:25, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Disappearing "|" signs in category sections in Safari

Funny, since early today, if a wikipedia article is in 3 or more categories, some categories are shown blended together. I.E., Silence of the lambs' category section contains "Best Picture OscarHorror FilmsFilms based on novelsBest Actor Oscar" all in one line. Any idea why this is so? The html source looks correct, btw. Peter S. 15:26, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

Sorry to break this up, but as the policy goes Wikipedia is not a discussion forum =) Please report this issue with Apple, or check with a relevant Macintosh message board. TDS ^{(talk • contribs)} 23:48, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Screenshot of Safari

should this screenshot be updated to correspond with the modern Wikipedia mainpage, also, is the screenshot of Safari 2.0? Furthermore, the current image is not high-quality as the buttons at the top-left are constrasted differently. BadCRC 19:15, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

The image is simply displaying Wikipedia in a skin other than Monobook (the default) — you can check out the other skins in your preferences. However, be bold and feel free to upload a new screenshot that you think looks better :) Just make sure to abide by the fair use policy regarding the resolution of copyrighted images. --bbatsell « give me a ring » 19:20, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

The screenshot should be of the Safari page on Wikipedia, for that sleek recursive look and feel. -- gstover, 2006 March 22

[edit] Nightly builds

Should there be more said about them? Perhaps something about nightshift which keeps the process simple? Paul^C/_T+ 20:33, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Proposed move (capitalization)

I suggest we move this page to Safari (Web browser), by reason that "Web" is an abbreviation of the proper noun "World Wide Web" and should correctly be capitalized. The Website article mentions some disagreement over the capitalization, but I think that article (and Web page) should be edited to consistently capitalize "Web" as well - after all, it's not just a World Wide Web, it's the World Wide Web! MFNickster 04:58, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

I'm not so sure about that.

• "Apache HTTP Server is a free software/open source HTTP web server for..." [7]
• "WorldWideWeb was the world's first web browser and..." [8]
• "Something Awful, sometimes abbreviated to SA, is a comedy web'site based..." [9]

They are only three examples, I could go on and on... Starting with a lower-case "w" seems more correct to me. AlistairMcMillan 18:26, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

There's no shortage of examples of people failing to capitalize "Web" - what I'm looking for is a good reason that these aren't errors. You almost never hear someone talk about "a web" in the sense of a set of HTML pages or sites. Interestingly, Microsoft calls a set of pages "a web" in their FrontPage development software. MFNickster 18:31, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Version history?

Per Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information, shouldn't the long version history information should probably be moved to a sister project? Or reformated to be more encyclopedic? By the time Safari hits v4.0, the article will be overrun with a giant spreadsheet. --Interiot 13:36, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

I don't think it adds much if anything to the article. All that's really needed is a paragraph on each of the major versions, including the date and version number of the most-recent update to that branch. -- Steven Fisher 05:08, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

Well since it was me who originally converted the version list to a table and obsessively/religiously filled it out, it seems appropriate that its me who should dial it back a bit. I've removed all the x.y.z released from the table, so we only cover the x.y releases. Hopefully this article is less... spreadsheety now. AlistairMcMillan 01:48, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Rumors of a Win32 version?

I've read this rumor on a number of sites. Is there any truth to this? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 68.116.98.179 (talk • contribs).

Apple's WebKit is ported to a number of platforms. You are probably thinking about Swift. (please sign, I could be answering a two years old question) Aahlborg 23:58, 29 December 2006 (UTC)