iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad – Apple has revolutionized the computing world and the way we surf the Internet today. With its innovative products, the technology company decisively defined the 2000s. Apple boss Steve Jobs is considered a guru, a kind of cult figure for all Mac fans. Everything Jobs touches seems to turn to gold. This also applies to the Apple browser Safari released in 2003 – at least the Apple boss is convinced of it.
Introduced 20 years ago, no superlative seems sufficient to celebrate the birth of the Safari browser. It’s the best, hottest and fastest browser there is, and it’s just great, Steve Jobs announced the good news on January 7, 2003 in his inimitable way.
The Apple boss is not even exaggerating significantly. Because Safari actually displays websites much faster than, for example, the biggest competitor at the time, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Until the release of Safari, this is also the pre-installed browser on Apple computers. This is guaranteed by a 1997 agreement between Microsoft and Apple.
Safari displaces Internet Explorer
A Microsoft browser on an Apple computer, Steve Jobs doesn’t like that at all. The Apple boss is therefore asking his programmers to develop their own browser. Apple is not only concerned with underlining its own fame as an innovative company. In fact, since it was first released in 1995, Internet Explorer has become slower and slower with each new version.
Steve Jobs was known for going his own way when developing new products. It does the same with the Safari browser. As the technical platform for Safari, Apple does not use the up-and-coming Gecko engine to display websites, but the free rendering software KHTML. This decision by Apple caused great astonishment in the industry at the time. But here, too, Steve Jobs demonstrates his instinct for emerging trends.
Apple later developed KHTML further and called the rendering software WebKit. Today, most browsers on the market use WebKit to display web pages.
Versions for mobile devices and Windows will follow
In the mid-2000s, Safari developed into one of the most popular browsers worldwide, which of course also had something to do with the emerging Apple cult. In 2007 the iPhone appears and with it a mobile version of the browser. At the same time, Apple is also releasing a Windows version.
In order to establish the browser on the competitor’s operating system, Apple uses a perfidious trick. Developed by Apple, QuickTime Player is very popular on Windows computers. When an update for the player was rolled out in 2007, all users also got the Safari browser installed on their hard drives free of charge.
However, the joy does not last long. Because in 2008 Google also gets into the browser business and presents Chrome. As a result, Safari is rapidly losing favor with the Internet community. Apple also fails to reverse the trend. In 2012, the company stopped developing the Safari browser for Windows.
Also read: The Apple myth about Steve Jobs – chic, expensive, cult!
Safari has mutated into a pure Apple browser
However, Safari remains the browser of choice on all Apple devices, most notably the iPhone and the iPad, which was added in 2010. No wonder: After all, the browser is pre-installed there and cannot be removed. In addition, Apple has taken technical precautions on its mobile devices to make surfing the web with other browsers as unattractive as possible.
In recent years, criticism of the technical development of Safari has increased. What annoys users the most? Larger Safari updates are only ever deployed with larger updates to the operating system. Apple remains unimpressed by this to this day.
In the battle of the world’s most popular browsers, Safari still plays an important role, even if the Apple browser has become much quieter. Chrome leads the list of the most popular browsers worldwide by a wide margin. Microsoft Edge has now just overtaken Safari and pushed it into third place. For every Apple fan, however, Safari remains the best, hottest and fastest browser ever, in the spirit of Steve Jobs.