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List:       kfm-devel
Subject:    (fwd) Greetings from the Safari team at Apple Computer
From:       Dirk Mueller <mueller () kde ! org>
Date:       2003-01-07 20:19:48
[Download RAW message or body]

Hi, 

Just received this email. I've removed the email addresses, but otherwise 
its unmodified. 

----- Forwarded message from Don Melton @apple.com -----

From: Don Melton <gramps@apple.com>
Subject: Greetings from the Safari team at Apple Computer
Date: Tue, 7 Jan 2003 11:31:10 -0800

Hi,

I'm the engineering manager of Safari, Apple Computer's new web browser 
built upon KHTML and KJS.  I'm sending you this email to thank you for 
making such a great open source project and introduce myself and my 
development team.  I also wish to explain why and how we've used your 
excellent technology.  It's important that you know we're committed to 
open source and contributing our changes, now and in the future, back 
to you, the original developers.  Hopefully this will begin a dialogue 
among ourselves for the benefit of both of our projects.

I've "cc"-ed my team on this email so you know their names and contact 
information.  Perhaps you already recognize some of those names.  Back 
in '98 I was one of the people who took Mozilla open source.  David 
Hyatt is not only the originator of the Chimera web browser project but 
also the inventor of XBL.  Darin Adler is the former lead of the 
Nautilus file manager.  Darin, Maciej Stachowiak, John Sullivan, Ken 
Kocienda, and I are all Eazel veterans.

The number one goal for developing Safari was to create the fastest web 
browser on Mac OS X.  When we were evaluating technologies over a year 
ago, KHTML and KJS stood out.  Not only were they the basis of an 
excellent modern and standards compliant web browser, they were also 
less than 140,000 lines of code.  The size of your code and ease of 
development within that code made it a better choice for us than other 
open source projects.  Your clean design was also a plus.  And the 
small size of your code is a significant reason for our winning startup 
performance as you can see reflected in the data at 
http://www.apple.com/safari/ .

How did we do it?  As you know, KJS is very portable and independent.  
The Sherlock team is already using it on Mac OS X in the framework my 
team prepared called JavaScriptCore.  But because KHTML requires other 
components from KDE and Qt, we wrote our own adapter library called KWQ 
(and pronounced "quack") that replaces these other components.  KHTML 
and KWQ have been encapsulated in a framework called WebCore.  We've 
also made significant enhancements, bug fixes, and performance 
improvements to KHTML and KJS.

Both WebCore and JavaScriptCore, which account for a little over half 
the code in Safari, are being released as open source today.  They 
should be available at 
http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/webcore/ very soon.  Also, 
we'll be sending you another email soon which details our changes and 
additions to KHTML and KJS.  I hope the detailed list in that email 
will help you understand what we've done a little better.  We'd also 
like to send this information to the appropriate KDE mailing list.  
Please advise us on which one to use.

We look forward to your comments.  We'd also like to speak to you and 
we'd be happy to set up a conference call at our expense for this 
purpose.

Thank you again for making KHTML and KJS.

Please forward this email to any contributor whom I may have missed.

-- 
Don Melton
Safari Engineering Manager
Apple Computer

P.S. -- I'm sending you this email while attending MacWorld exposition 
so it may take myself and my staff several hours before we can respond 
to email.  My apologies in advance.

----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
Dirk (received 493 mails today)
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