When I first heard the name "Safari"

At Maxis, we didn't arrive at the totally obvious name The Sims until very late in development.<p>At first there was the secret development name, Project X, but everybody had a Project X, and we certainly couldn't ship with that.<p>Then there was Jamie's obvious name, Dollhouse, which was quite descriptive, but boys would hate it.<p>Then there was Will's quirky name, Super Happy Friends Home, which only the Japanese would love.<p>Then there was Jim's high minded name, Jefferson, for the pursuit of happiness, but it made everybody think of the sitcom The Jeffersons.<p>Then there was the legendary perfectly descriptive catchy epic name, that everyone on the team really loved, which we dreamed up together in a brainstorming session when we were all quite stoned, but by the next day we all forgot it, and nobody could ever remember what it was again, although we could all distinctly remember the warm glow of knowing that it was the best possible name in the world, which everyone would love. Those were good times! ;)<p>But for some reason, during all that time, despite racking our brains, nobody ever though of "The Sims", which is retrospect was a totally obvious name for a continuation of the SimCity franchise focusing on the people in the city. (The original SimCity manual referred to the people in the city as "the Sims," so there was a long standing precedent.)<p>I have no idea who eventually came up with the name The Sims, and I'm happy with it, but it definitely wasn't the perfect name that everybody forgot. It's lost in the sands of time...

I think many of you in the Hacker News crowd will recognize this problem that I'm yet to find a solution to myself:<p><pre><code> mkdir [blinking cursor] </code></pre> Then 30 minutes passes and you didn't end up making that thing anyway since you got distracted while thinking up a name for it.

Calling the browser 'Safari' is weird, if you think about it. I remember trying to teach my mom how to use the iPad to access the internet:<p><i>"First press the home button"</i><p><i>"Ok"</i><p><i>"Now tap on Safari"</i><p><i>"But I don't want to see animals"</i><p><i>"..."</i><p>And that's when I realized why Internet Explorer was so successful.

<i>“Please don’t let us name the browser after a feminine hygiene product!”</i><p>Ironic that this was a concern, given the later iPad

Great story. It shows that doesn't matter if you are Apple or a solo developer, product naming is hard. Actually, as the OP, I find coding easier. Nevertheless, we can't ship products with placeholder names. I have a little brainstorming process that goes like this:<p>1) List the name of all competitors that made into the business plan; // this is important mainly to avoid problems<p>2) List of nouns that evoke a basic understanding of the root problem the program tries to solve; // I know it's obvious, but finding a name right here create an instant connection with your target users<p>3) List all the features that make the program stand out; // Again it's obvious, yet this is a great source of names<p>4) Mix and match all these these words, throw them into a bucket, and sleep on it for a while;<p>5) Usually, after some days have passed I come back, and weed out the crapy ones; // and...<p>6) Work a little more on the rest with a dictionary, if needed go back to 3;<p>7) Finally, when I have a short list of good names I try to find domain names;<p>8) mkdir &#60;project_name&#62; // or mv &#60;old&#62; &#60;new&#62; :)<p>How do you go about your process?

It was a poor choice of name in that it gives no hint as to what the application might actually do.<p>While on holiday and in need of some internet, a (highly intelligent) friend searched around the local town and could only found a Mac in a hotel lobby. Despite being very motivated she was unable to persuade it to open a browser and eventually gave up and was left wondering how Macs could possibly be described as intuitive or user friendly.

Just for some perspective, in my time at Apple "It doesn't suck" was usually the highest form of praise possible.

Product naming can be ridiculously hard. Even if you have something you personally think is clever, everyone else can think you're a dork.<p>Related anecdotes:<p>When trying to come up with a name for Firefox (after having two other names rejected due to trademark snafus), a friend of mine sarcastically rattled off a bunch of alternatives using the same prefix as the outgoing "Firebird" on IRC one night. I think it was "Firecrap, Fireturd, Firefox". I stopped him. The consonance was great, and the team loved the name. The rest is history.<p>At the beginning of Chrome, we had to come up with a project name. Inspired how Netscape did their project naming, we did a vote. The results were truly awful. I think "Goose" was the winner. At this point Linus came in and put us out of our misery, "How about Chrome... it's kind of ironic given the UI design." Everyone agreed that it was much better. That was before we'd written really any code, so it stuck for the entire project. Shortly before launch the marketing folk did a brief exploration, but we threw up all over their suggestions, and Chrome stuck.

The weird thing about Safari is that it's simultaneously a niche irrelevance on a minor computing platform, a groundbreaking web browser of major historical import, and the public face of the most important wad of code in play on Earth today.

I've always felt that picking a solid name is one of those things that will never happen while I'm thinking about it intently. Glad to hear it's the same for the big boys too...

IBrowse would have been a bad choice. There is an Amiga OS Browser which goes by that name, and it is a little bit older than Safari.<p><a href="http://www.ibrowse-dev.net/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ibrowse-dev.net/</a>

This bit surprised me somewhat:<p>'Not only had we gotten very used to calling it that, the string “Alexander” was all over the code and buried in its resources. So the engineering team wasn’t just curious about the real name, they were worried about correctly and completely changing the placeholder name at the last minute.'<p>Why would you litter a codebase with disparate string literals referring to a "placeholder name" rather than using a single resource file or a single #define?

Not sure of the actual origin, but it seems to me that Safari is a reference to "journey", and works with the OS X naming after big cats. Then again it could just make sense in hindsight.

Based on no evidence whatsoever, just an intuition about Jobs, I would not be surprised if the point of reference was <i>Surfin' Safari</i> - the Beach Boys song.<p>It is free from the negative connotations of a reference to Africa and consistent with the sort of Californian to which Jobs aspired. Apple was funded by a VW microbus after all.<p>The play on surfing is consistent with Apple's image of how consumers should be oriented to use their products.

I remember when Safari was very buggy in its early versions and some folks within Apple had taken to calling it "So Sorry". I had several bug reports on a web app my company had developed for Apple that turned out to be Safari bugs. They were fixed rather rapidly, which is what would finally convince my contacts that it definitely wasn't a bug in our web app. "So Sorry" they said...

I always thought it came from the Hindi word Safari, which translates to Traveller or Explorer (Safar is a Journey).<p>I personally codename my projects pffft.

free-DOM, it's actually a clever name

But why is the icon a compass though?

The name Safari is still one of those mystery to me, I like the name, and my guess it properly came from the idea of Navigation -&#62; Compass - &#62; Safari. Although i was expecting a post to truly reveal the mystery behind the reason for such a name.

I always assumed it was a reference to "Surfin' Safari", the Beach Boys song. Maybe not.

Oh the irony, that Safari on my MBP has a rendering bug, probably acceleration related, that truncates the text in the sixth paragraph.

"We could ship a browser in a year" he missed the second part "thanks to work done on kHTML which we based it on"

Ancient powerful or mythical cities here. ElDorado, Hamunaptra, Babylon, etc.

I feel like I am pretty good at naming things (I dont think about it for too long, if that matters).<p>Describe to me a product and I'll name it for you.