Keeping Safari a secret

I distinctly remember how the web dev world (myself included) groaned at the prospect of supporting another rendering engine. Gecko was clearly the best browser at the time, and the choice of KHTML seemed bizarre, to say the least.<p>Even the intention of Apple building it's own web browser seemed weird, Apple had failed at a previous homebrewed browser (Cyberdog), why not just build on top of what Mozilla had already done?<p>I remember Apple stating that Konqueror's code was much more leaner, faster and modern. I've always wondered if the birth of Safari was an early sign that Apple was interested in developing the pieces missing for an internet device. Safari seemed like a godsend foresight from Apple when they released the iPhone, but I can't help wonder if it was planned this way all along.

TLDR: for whatever reasons it was a very top-secret project, so they spoofed the user agent, the end.

&#62;Back around 1990, some forward-thinking IT person secured for Apple an entire Class A network of IP addresses.<p>I found that fact to be the most interesting part of the article. The list of other Class A holders is also interesting: <a href="http://www.aturtschi.com/whois/neta1.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.aturtschi.com/whois/neta1.html</a>

Don, would you be willing to share a bit in future posts about how you grew the team, how you organised yourselves and how that changed over the course of the project? Also, what thought process did you go through in the decision of how much to include in V1.0 vs leave to later releases? As a team lead/product manager I'm always interested in hearing other people's experiences, and your experience and writing style put you in a better place than many to do that. It is the thought processes and the dynamics of interacting with others in an organisation that make software development stories interesting.

&#62; We couldn’t ship with the real Safari user agent string disabled, but we came up with the next best thing — automatically enabling it after a certain date.<p>Does that mean that if you set the date of your computer back before 2003, the user agent will become Internet Explorer?

Does anyone know why Apple stopped doing this(or stopped doing it as thoroughly)? With the possible exception of the original, sites have consistently reported visits from iOS/iPhone:iPad user agents (and claimed that the ip originated within apple) well before launch. Recent example: <a href="http://thenextweb.com/apple/2013/01/01/developers-begin-seeing-new-apple-iphone-hardware-and-ios-7-in-usage-logs/" rel="nofollow">http://thenextweb.com/apple/2013/01/01/developers-begin-seei...</a>

This blog is revealing more interesting tidbits from inside Apple than the official biographer of Steve Jobs. How sad is that?

"Which explains why the Safari user agent string has so much extra information in it, e.g. KHTML, like Gecko — the names of other browser engines."<p>Wasn't Safari/WebKit largely based on KHTML in the beginning? This doesn't say it wasn't, but seems to imply that there was a separation of the two that was more complete than it really was.<p>I realize the OP is in a better position than I to know exactly what the reasoning here was, but it seems like reporting yourself as KHTML when you are largely based on the KHTML rendering engine would just be a sensible and practical thing to do outside of all this cloak and dagger stuff.<p>(Granted, I doubt there were very many websites, if any at all, that gave a rat's ass about special cases for KHTML compatibility).

If they were worried about server admins correlating Apple's IP addresses with a new User-Agent string, the team could have VPN'd to a non-Apple network to access the web.

Interesting, I wonder if it would be possible to start a rumour by having a number of people spoof their user-agent string?<p>Sure , they wouldn't route back to an Apple IP address but then who's to say Apple doesn't browse via proxy/vpn somewhere?

This seems like an insane waste of resources just to keep a secret.<p>Did this get you in any programming troubles in the long term?

must have been easier to use an ip filter and base the identifier on ip... duh..

This still makes me think that Ninjas work at Apple. How other can they evade such a public part of the interwebs? <a href="http://www.askaninja.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.askaninja.com/</a> I guess.