Mozilla has faced criticism before over the pace of its development efforts, which were originally conceived as the Web community's best chance to challenge the dominance of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Mozilla 1.0 was released last year, after long delays that effectively allowed Microsoft to cement its lead. AOL Time Warner's Netscape division issued Netscape 6 -- its first browser based on the Mozilla code -- to poor reviews, but a subsequent update answered many of the critics. Netscape Communications is Mozilla's corporate sponsor. Mozilla and Netscape have both seen small gains in market share, appearing in the market alongside an independent entry from Norway's Opera Software. None has significantly challenged Microsoft's lead, however, which remains well above 90 percent, according to a recent survey. Apple's browser is unlikely to alter the market-share picture, but is still a significant entry into the field. Although it caters to a small group of users, it could help Apple wean itself from its reliance on Microsoft's IE and create new software services. Apple's vote also carries significant weight in software circles as a result of its development of several highly regarded applications for its Macintosh personal computers, particularly its iTunes and iPhoto multimedia tools. Melton's email detailed the Safari team's deep roots in the Mozilla project. Melton helped launch Mozilla in 1998. Safari engineer David Hyatt launched Chimera, a version of Mozilla for Mac OS X. Asked to elaborate on its rejection of Mozilla, Apple went out of its way to minimise its dissatisfaction with the technology it bypassed. "The Gecko engine is fairly well-regarded engine," said Chris Bourdon, product marketing manager for Mac OS X. "It isn't to say that there is anything poor about Gecko or Mozilla. The Safari team just felt KHTML was a better code base from which they could build a browser." Bourdon said Safari engineers looked at size, speed and compatibility in choosing KHTML. In addition to Mozilla, Apple also considered building its own browser from scratch. Bourdon said the fact KHTML's small size -- 140,000 lines of code -- let Apple build a browser that is a svelte 3MB in size. He compared that with Netscape's more than 17MB, though that includes an email reader and other peripheral applications. Untying browser knots
Apple, which embarked on its browser project in order to free itself further from dependence on Microsoft and its Internet Explorer browser, may have balked at using Mozilla because of its ties to AOL Time Warner. The media giant's Netscape unit funds and staffs Mozilla's nonvolunteer positions. Though shared enmity with Microsoft has made Apple's relations with AOL Time Warner comparatively warm, the question remains whether Apple would want to trade in its browser reliance on the world's largest technology company for that of the world's largest media and technology company. Apple and analysts alike insisted that technical, rather than political, considerations were the real reason behind Apple's choice. "Every discussion I had with them had more to do with the quality and size of the kernel and what they could do with it," said Tim Bajarin, an analyst at Creative Strategies. "My suspicion is the real goal was to just try to work with what they considered the best technology that they could build on. And they did a heck of a lot of research." Since Safari's release last week, Web developers have been trying the browser out and discovering bugs in its rendering capabilities and standards compliance. That's only to be expected from the first public beta of a browser, and Safari's Hyatt has been maintaining a Web log detailing some of the more prominent problems and their resolutions. While Mozilla has long carried the torch of standards compliance, standards advocates called the new prominence of its open-source competitor a boon for Web standards. "The two projects have had very different histories and goals -- some very much in line with our stance, and some that may have served to detract attention away from their implementing standards as well as we'd like," said Steven Champeon, a member of the Web Standards Project and chief technology officer of Hesketh.com. "But in the long run, as long as the number of highly standards-compliant browsers continues to grow, and we can see some great competition out there, everyone wins." One Web developer cheered Apple's decision, and agreed with the company's comparative evaluation of the two open-source browsers. KHTML is "very fast, doesn't have nearly the bloat of Mozilla, and does most of what I need," said Alex Russell, a Web application developer for SecurePipe and a lead developer for netWindows. "The Mozilla rendering engine isn't slow, but at the same time it has emphasised crossplatform correctness over speed, while KTHML has taken a slightly more expedient approach of shooting for a smaller feature set, getting it right, and then making things fast."
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