I just became the owner of a brand new 13″ white MacBook and for the first time, I’ve been able to experience for myself many of the delights of Mac OS X.

Safari is Mac OS X’s default browser and it is a fine browser at that. According to Wikipedia, it has a market share now of around 4.7% in Q1 2007, and the general trend is increasing.

In this special Gizbuzz post, I thought I would take a look at Safari - where it is now and where it might go in the future.

A very brief history lesson

Safari is, as I said, OS X’s default browser, although that wasn’t always the case. Back when Apple looked like they were in real trouble, they struck a deal with Microsoft. Microsoft pledged to building Office 98 for the Mac, and Internet Explorer would become the default browser for Mac OS 9. It stayed that way right up until OS X Panther (10.3) in 2003.

At that point, Microsoft decided that they would discontinue IE for Mac and that prompted Apple to start development on their own browser, Safari, which would be released with the Panther OS release.

Safari wasn’t actually written from scratch. The KHTML rendering engine was being developed for KDE and Apple saw the opportunity to use the KHTML project to use as a base for Safari’s underlying code. With cooperation with the KDE developers, WebKit became the name for Safari’s HTML, CSS and JavaScript system. The core components of WebKit are still open source (as is KHTML), but the Safari GUI is proprietary.

Unfortunately, the code from Apple’s WebKit project and KHTML are not synchronised, such that a KHTML browser does not behave exactly the same as a WebKit browser (although there are efforts to try and ‘unfork’ the code and in the process make KDE’s Konqueror browser better).

Safari in the news

Recently, Safari has been in the news quite a bit and I want to focus on a couple of stories here.

Safari on the iPhone

First of all, back in January we had the iPhone announcement at Macworld. One of the things Steve Jobs said the iPhone ran (apart from OS X, of which there has been a lot of debate) was Safari.

Clearly it’s not the same as Safari on OS X as far as the frontend is concerned, but I’m pretty sure it is WebKit running at the backend. Certainly it’s one of the most advanced browsers on a mobile device the world has ever seen and it looks like we could see an interesting battle for the title of ‘Most Advanced Portable Web Browser’, with Opera doing similar good work on platforms like the Wii.

Safari on Windows

I think for the most part, this story was Digg hyperbole and I personally don’t think it’s likely to happen, but there were rumours that Apple were going to port Safari to Windows.

Apart from this fake screenshot, which to me looks like an elegant Photoshop of bits of the iTunes interface and some clever trickery, we haven’t seen any substantial evidence to support this claim.

Plus I don’t think Apple would do it - what is in it for them?

While Safari isn’t on Windows, there is a project to get the WebKit rendering engine on Windows, which should make it easier for web developers that don’t have a Mac to test on WebKit browsers. Swift is one such project. It’s currently pre-release, but it worked reasonably well on my Windows setup.

The future

On the WebKit project website, one of the things you can do is download a nightly build of Safari using the latest version of the WebKit engine. It hopefully gives you a taste of what Safari will be like in the future, and perhaps looking towards what will be on the final iPhone and in Mac OS X Leopard.

At the moment, the only differences I can find between stock Safari and the nightly WebKit are subtle - things like rendering button styles on HTML buttons instead of ignoring them for Mac styles (one of Safari’s favourite things to do).

Safari’s market share is still apparently increasing. Whether that’s due to more Mac switchers, or people already using OS X who are switching browsers, it’s quite significant. With the iPhone, we might see the number of Safari users increase still. Unless Safari/Win does arrive, or a large percentage of the world goes Mac tomorrow, it’s unlikely to make a huge amount of difference, however, apart from perhaps getting more developers to test for Safari and other WebKit browsers.

In the unlikely event that Apple do release an official Safari for Windows, Firefox may have a serious contender on its hands. Safari is much speedier than Firefox in a number of respects, including startup time and rendering speed, but the lack of extensibility and plugins might hamper Safari quite a lot if it were to take Firefox head-on.

Safari is a good browser, and if it was opened up to more people, then I think it would be a serious contender for browser market share. Apparently, though, Firefox extensions and a consistent interface across Windows, Linux and OS X have got me to tap out this article in Firefox for Mac OS X, instead of Apple’s offering.