Last June, Netscape"s expedition into the land of open source bore fruit in the form of Mozilla 1.0, a Web browser that arguably unseated Microsoft Corp."s Internet Explorer—certainly not in popularity, but in overall excellence. At last week"s MacWorld Expo, however, Apple Computer Inc. launched a Web browsing salvo of its own, called Safari, along with a reminder that there"s still plenty of room for innovation in this space.
eWEEK Labs tested a beta version of Safari, which runs only on Mac OS X 10.2 or later. Safari is based on the open-source rendering engine KHTML. This is the engine that powers Konqueror, the native Web browser of the K Desktop Environment.
The choice of KHTML will likely end up benefiting Apple and KDE alike: Apple has turned over to the KDE Project the bug fixes and performance improvements it made to KHTML, and KDE developers have expressed interest in moving forward with a common HTML rendering back end for both Konqueror and Safari.