Keeping Safari a Secret

In 2003 at the Macworld conference Steve Jobs unveiled Safari, Apple’s entry into the browser wars. In this candid blog post, Don Melton shares how he and his team kept the browser secret.

Melton is best known for starting and managing the Safari and Webkit projects at Apple, he shares stories of what he had to go through to hide Safari from the world to ensure that Steve could reveal a totally new and surprising development at Macworld 2003.

For much of the time we spent developing Safari — long before it was called by that name — it pretended to be Microsoft Internet Explorer. Specifically, Internet Explorer for Mac, which Apple had provided with the OS since 1998. Less than six months before Safari debuted, it started pretending to be a Mozilla browser.

Why did we do this? And how did we make Safari pretend to be these browsers when its code and behavior were so different?

Keeping Safari a Secret [via Gigaom]

by Jason Fitzpatrick via How-To Geek