Tag: WebKit

Categories
Apple Mozilla

Apple’s new Mactel’s and UserAgents

Currently UserAgents for the two most popular Mac browsers are as follows:

Safari

This visitor used Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/412 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/412

Firefox

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4

Does anyone out there know if Apple has switched their developer edition Intel Macs to a different UserAgent yet? I presume it’s simply swapping out PPC with i686.

It would be nice if Apple, or someone from the Safari team [collective look toward David Hyatt] would give an official mention. Or will they do like Windows and not say anything?

It would be nice to know early how this is going to be done. It would allow web developers to start updating log analysis software today so it accurately represents those new systems when it ships (and allows developers to see how much of a market there is for Intel based Macs). Not to mention it allows us to make websites that sniff for the processor type and choose what download the user really needs (rather than force a user to download a larger universal binary).

I’ve yet to see any official mention on the Apple website regarding the UserAgent change and proper detection methods for such purposes.

Categories
Apple Mozilla

Safari’s WebKit is now open

Hyatt made the announcement on his blog. Using bugzilla, and cvs. It says it’s even possible to get checkin access if your a contributor with a proven track record. I didn’t see any lxr like tool for viewing source via the web (very handy), or a list of reviewers. Perhaps that’s still to come, the website looks pretty new.

Anyway, congrats to the Safari team in addressing all those concerns a few weeks ago.

I’m curious how perhaps this can improve browser relations across the board. Not that the Safari team and Mozilla are so distant to begin with, but this could lead to bigger better things. This is great news for everyone.

Categories
Apple

Apple and the Internet

Anyone still not reading David Hyatt’s Blog should start doing so ASAP. If you read this blog, and find anything relevant, you will most definitely find his relevant. He’s a browser guru with his hand in many things. A definite site to bookmark. A few comments on this whole Safari/Dashboard thing…

Personally, I wish it were done in XUL, and XUL were fully implemented on Mac OS X via Web Kit. Would have been really neat. Personally I find XUL based interfaces to feel quite natural at this point. Even Mac OS X’s Firefox is feeling good. With Apple’s concentration it would have been great. But they did go with the second best (and still good) option of HTML, with lots of standards support. And that’s still a good solution, though not my personal favorite.

I’d also like to make note of a good quote here:

We have a phrase we like to use here on the Safari team, and that’s “real-world standards compliance.” What that means is that where possible we attempt to be fully compatible with the W3C standards, but we also want to support the real-world standards, i.e., extensions that for better or worse have become de facto standards. If you really do believe we should not have implemented contenteditable, then you are simply out of touch with reality.

Hyatt does say something that makes me feel really comfortable with Apple’s approach on standards:

finally we have submitted all of our extensions to the WHAT-WG for review. The slider in particular is already in the Web Forms draft. It is our hope that these HTML extensions will ultimately be standardized by a working group, but I wanted to emphasize that we are working with other browser vendors such as Opera and Mozilla to ensure that these extensions are implementable in those browsers and that these extensions can be standardized. We are not simply off “doing our own thing.”

This I’d really like to see happen. I’d ideally like to see these things work on multiple browsers, just like the new plugin system coming around. Perhaps Mozilla can be setup to allow these new Widgets to work? Would be nice to see Apple, Mozilla team up.

Lastly, regarding namespace…

Webkit is looking to use:

http://www.apple.com/2004/xhtml-extended/

IBM adapts HTML and uses:

http://www.ibm.com/data/dtd/v11/ibmxhtml1-transitional.dtd

I kind of perfer the /dtd/ and have a documented DTD available, so my ideal solution would be:

http://www.apple.com/dtd/1.0/xhtml-extended.dtd/

holding the format dtd/version/item.

Just my $0.02.

Categories
Mozilla

Apple Helping out Mozilla

Very interesting developments lately regarding Apple and Mozilla. At first, it appeared the groups were closer than they appeared. Rumor was that iBrowser (known as Safari now), was going to use then Chimera (now Camino) as it’s basis. Ended up Apple used KHTML, and some claimed it made them “compete”, though most including myself believe any standards compliant engine is good.

Now Pinkerton makes a very interesting find:

Apple has started bundling NSPR and NSS in Panther

From November 3, 2003 @ 10:38 PM

So Apple apparently is providing some sort of Aid for Mozilla technologies. But that’s not all.

David Hyatt notes his work on Safari:

(5) A complete implementation of the XUL box model. Safari on Panther supports the complete XUL box model, including horizontal and vertical boxes, the ability to flex, and the ability to reorder content and reverse content. If you’re building canned content that you control using WebKit, you’ll find a whole new range of layout possibilities at your disposal. Need to create dynamically sized headers and footers and flexible center content? The XUL box model can do that. Need to center an object within the viewport? The XUL box model can do that too.

From October 28, 2003 @ 12:48 AM

Henrik Gemal also notes XUL support in Safari.

Ok, I found it interesting. Perhaps someone else will as well.