Hey guys it’s Greg with Apple Explained,and today we’re going to explore the history of Safari

This topic won last week’s voting poll andif you didn’t get to vote, make sure you’re subscribed, that way the voting polls willshow up right in your activity feed

Now Safari is Apple’s web browser that wasreleased back in 2003 with Mac OS 10

3 Panther

But you might be wondering, “what web browserdid the Mac use before Safari was created?” Well they used Netscape Navigator which wasthe most popular web browser at the time thanks to a very special capability where text andgraphics appeared on the screen simultaneously as the webpage loaded

Now that may not sound like a very specialfeature today, but earlier web browsers would stay completely blank until 100% of the webcontent loaded; which meant it could take up to 3 minutes to load just one webpage

Netscape Navigator served as the Mac’s defaultweb browser until 1998

And what happened next was quite fascinating

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997,he found the company in much worse financial shape than he expected, discovering they werejust 90 days from bankruptcy

And those desperate times called for desperatemeasures

Steve Jobs initiated talks with Microsoft,the arch nemesis of Apple in those days, and tried working out an investment deal

You see, Apple had a long-running lawsuitthat claimed Microsoft copied the look and feel of Windows from the Macintosh operatingsystem

This gave Apple some leverage in negotiationsby offering to drop the lawsuit if Microsoft invested in Apple

But there was another factor at play, Microsoftwas in the middle of an antitrust fight over its forceful promotion of Internet Explorerwhich was tarnishing Microsofts image with consumers and could lead to an antitrust lawsuitfrom the US government

So it was in Microsoft’s interest to negotiatea deal with Apple in order to keep them around as a competitor

As the deal took shape, five specific termswere agreed upon by both parties

First, Microsoft had to make a 150 milliondollar investment in non-voting Apple shares

That meant Microsoft didn’t have any sayin decisions Apple made despite being a large shareholder

Second, both Apple and Microsoft would establishpatent cross licensing

So any existing or future patents createdwithin five years would be shared between both companies

Third, Microsoft would commit to creatingMac versions of Microsoft Office for a five year period, with the same number of majorreleases as Windows

Fourth, Microsoft and Apple would collaborateon Java compatibility to strengthen its viability as a competitor

Fifth, was that every Mac had to ship withInternet Explorer as the default web browser

And not many people were happy about it

But the blow was softened when Jobs clarifiedthat users could change the default browser back to Netscape Navigator which still shippedwith every Mac

So Internet Explorer served as the Mac’sdefault web browser for five years until the deal with Microsoft expired in 2003

And this gave Apple the opportunity to introducea web browser of their own

On January 7, 2003, at Macworld in San Francisco,Steve Jobs announced that Apple had developed their own web browser, called Safari

It was based on Apple's internal variationof the KHTML rendering engine, called WebKit

Apple released the first beta version forOS X that day

A number of official and unofficial beta versionsfollowed, until version 1

0 was released on June 23, 2003

Safari was available as a separate downloadfor Mac OS 10

2 Jaguar, but was included with the Mac OS 10

3 Panther release on October24, 2003

Even with Safari as the default browser, Appledecided to keep Internet Explorer on the Mac as an alternative

The second version of Safari came just twoyears later and did something quite interesting… Thanks to debugging and optimization workdone by Apple Safari developer Dave Hyatt, Safari 2 was the first web browser to passthe Acid2 test

Now, Acid2 was a test page created by theWeb Standards Project to expose page rendering flaws in web browsers and other applicationsthat rendered HTML

Its purpose was to encourage adoption of universalweb development standards, so web developers didn’t have to waste time tweaking theirwebsites to display correctly across different browsers

Establishing a universal web standard wasimportant

Without it, the internet would have likelybecome fragmented into pockets of incompatible content, with certain websites only availableto users who had the right browser

The Acid2 test was targeted toward InternetExplorer in particular since it didn’t follow hardly any web standards at all

Something that frustrated users and developersalike, since it was prone to display web pages differently from other browsers

This forced web developers to spend extratime tweaking their web pages in order to display correctly on Internet Explorer

But Microsoft dismissed Acid2, describingthe test as a “wish list" of features rather than a true test of standards compliance

But over time, more browsers began passingthe test, and pressure mounted on Microsoft to do the same

Which they eventually did with Internet Explorer8 in 2007, two years after Safari

In addition to passing the Acid2 test, Safari2 featured a 1

8 times speed boost over the previous version

On January 9, 2007, Apple introduced the iPhone,it was the first time Safari was available on a mobile device

And later that year Apple announced Safari3 which was the first version available on Windows

During the announcement, Jobs ran a benchmarkcomparing the most popular Windows browsers, with Safari coming out on top

This is when Apple began claiming that Safariwas the world’s fastest browser

Later third-party tests would confirm Apple'sclaim that Safari 3 was the fastest browser on the Windows platform

But this was in terms of initial data loadingover the Internet, it was found to be only a hair faster than Internet Explorer 7 andMozilla Firefox when loading static content from local cache

Beginning with Safari 4, the address bar hadbeen completely revamped

The blue inline progress bar was replacedwith a spinning bezel with a loading indicator

The button to add a bookmark was attachedto the address bar by default

And the reload/stop button was superimposedon the right end of the address bar

All of these changes were made to streamlinethe interface and make Safari appear similar to the mobile version on the iPhone

Safari 4 also included new features like CoverFlow for browsing History and Bookmarks, Top Sites with a nice thumbnail view, improveddeveloper tools, and a Nitro JavaScript engine that ran JavaScript up to eight times fasterthan Internet Explorer

Safari 4 also passed the new Acid3 web standardstest

Apple released Safari 5 on June 7, 2010, featuringthe new Safari Reader for reading articles on the web without distraction and a 30 percentJavaScript performance increase over Safari 4

Safari 5 included more than a dozen new HTML5technologies with a focused on interoperability, and for the first time developers could createSafari Extensions to customize and enhance the browsing experience

Apple also decided to re-integrated the progressbar back into the address bar for this release, and that’s something I vividly remembersince I was so happy to have that feature back

Safari 6 was initially planned as a Safari5

2 release until Apple announced the change to 6

0 at its 2012 WWDC

The release of Safari 6 coincided with OSX Mountain Lion on July 25, 2012, and it was directly integrated into the OS

This meant Safari was no longer availablefor download from Apple’s website

Mac users running OS X Lion could upgradeto Safari 6 through a software update

But it wasn’t available for earlier operatingsystems and it wasn’t available on Windows

Apple said, "Safari 6 is available for MountainLion and Lion

Safari 5 continues to be available for Windows

” Safari 6 included some helpful features likeiCloud Tabs, which synced user’s open web tabs across their iOS and OS X devices

Safari 6 also included new privacy featuresincluding an "Ask websites not to track me" preference, and the ability for websites tosend Mountain Lion users notifications

Safari 7 was released in 2013 and broughtimprovements to JavaScript performance and memory usage, as well as a new look for TopSites and the Sidebar

There was a new Shared Links feature and anew Power Saver feature which paused Plugins that weren’t in use

The next two updates weren’t very big, Safari8 just included WebGL support, stronger privacy features, increased speed and efficiency,enhanced iCloud integration, and an updated design

And Safari 9 in 2015 featured the abilityto mute and pin tabs

But in 2016, Apple made up for the last twoupdates with Safari 10

It added a slew of new capabilities to Safari

There was Apple Pay, picture-in-picture supportfor video, a new bookmarks sidebar, a redesigned history and bookmarks view, site-specificzoom where Safari would remember how far you were zoomed in to websites, improved autofill,reader improvements, and the ability to reopen recently closed tabs

With all those new features, you may wonderwhat else Apple could possible add in the next version? Well in Safari 11 Apple added some of my favoritefeatures

First, was the end of autoplaying videos

Safari would prevent videos from playing untilyou actually clicked the play button, which is how all videos should work

But the best addition was Intelligent TrackingPrevention

This prevented websites from installing trackingcookies onto your browser and following you around the internet

The feature was very difficult to implementand major advertising groups objected to it, saying the feature would reduce the free servicessupported by advertising, while other experts praised the change

Now everything we’ve covered so far is forthe desktop version of Safari

But there are some features in iOS that Iwant to go over next

Starting with iOS 1, Safari had the uniqueability to bookmark links as Web Clip icons on the home screen which acted as shortcutsto certain websites

You could also press on an image for threeseconds to save it to your photo album

In iOS 4, the “find” function was builtright into the search box and users could print a webpage with AirPrint

iOS 5 added true tabbed browsing, similarto the desktop version, but only for iPads

Something called Reading List was also addedwhich allowed users to save articles for later, and this list would sync across all the usersdevices

And Reader, not to be confused with ReadingList, would organize all the text and images on a webpage into a more readable format whileremoving all the website’s advertising

Finally, private browsing was added whichprevent cookies or web history from being saved

In iOS 6 iCloud Tabs were added, just likein the desktop version

And offline reading lists meant users couldread articles previously stored without an Internet connection

Full-screen landscape view for iPhone andiPod Touch users hid most of Safari’s controls in order to see more web content

iOS 7 featured a redesigned icon and interface,a 64-bit build on devices using the A7 processor, iCloud Keychain which saved passwords, usernames,and credit card numbers, a password generator, shared links, tracking prevention, parentalcontrols, an increase in the tab limit from 9 to 36, and a unified smart search field

In iOS 8 a search function was added to browsethrough all open tabs, a new sidebar would slide in to reveal bookmarks, the readinglist, and shared links, the address bar would automatically hide while scrolling down, spotlightsearch was made available from the address bar, a “scan credit card” option was offeredwhen entering credit card information on a website, you could enable private browsingfor a specific tab, an option to request the desktop version of a website was available,and holding the new tab button would show recently closed tabs

iOS 9 added content blocking extensions torestrict specific web content, safari view controller allowed web content to be displayedfrom within an app, and an improved reader view allowed users to choose different fontsand themes while reading an article

iOS 10 increased the tab limit again, thistime from 36 to 500

And finally iOS 11 didn’t really changemuch, but featured a rounder search bar

So that is the history of Safari, let me knowwhat features you guys would like to see in the next version

And if you want to vote for the next videotopic, don’t forget to subscribe

Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you nexttime