Twenty years ago on this day at Macworld Expo 2003, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs introduced the world to the Safari browser designed for Mac computers. Back then, Apple advertised Safari as “The fastest web browser ever for Mac”.
Image source: macrumors.com
According to Apple, the original Safari loaded web pages more than three times faster than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer for Mac. Internet Explorer was the default browser on the Mac from 1998 until October 2003, when OS X Panther was launched, which introduced Safari.
“Safari is the fastest browser for Mac and we expect many will consider it the best browser ever. We’re bringing innovation back to this category with the first all-new browser in years.”said Steve Jobs in 2003.
Safari public beta became available in OS X Jaguar in January 2003. All major browser features, as well as the WebKit page rendering engine, access to the Google search engine, a pop-up ad blocker and a file upload tool were already available in the beta version of the application. The mobile version of Safari for iPhone was released in 2007, and the browser appeared on iPad in 2010. At the same time, the browser continues to use the WebKit engine, and this applies to all versions of the browser.
Note that Safari was eventually replaced by the Google Chrome browser released in 2008, which remains the most popular application for interacting with web content on computers and Macs. However, Apple still claims that Safari is the fastest browser for Mac, with Chrome loading frequently visited websites 50% faster on average.
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