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January 7, 2003

The Safari Plot Thickens

In a mail entitled "Greetings from the Safari team at Apple Computer", a few of the names behind Safari made themselves known, many of whom Linux observers will recognize as the leading lights of Eazel.

Darin Adler was Eazel's ex-software VP. I interviewed him a while back when Eazel was getting a lot of press from big media. Don Melton is unnamed in it, but he turns up in a beanbag chair in chapter one of The Joy of Linux (you can download chapter 1 as a PDF).

If there's any irony to be found here, it's in both the return of these prodigals to Apple, which they'd hoped to recreate in their image using Linux during the boom; and the fact that their use of Mozilla for the Nautilus project irked them enough to make them reuse KHTML, instead, which comes from KDE, which wasn't license-pure enough for them when they first set out to build a Linux project.

Well, Safari is much better out of the gate than Nautilus was (I know they aren't the same project... I'm just comparing the sense of quality), and it's a much simpler project. Let's see what they do.