Apple Exploits Open Source to Produce an Outstanding Browser

If you don't like the product you're being sold, taking your business to a competitor is a good idea. But becoming a competitor may be a better idea. That's what Apple has done with its Safari Web browser: Instead of waiting for Microsoft to update the aging Internet Explorer, it wrote its own software.

Mac users can be glad it did. Safari (www.apple.com/safari) is one of Apple's finest releases, an elegant piece of work that shows a refreshing emphasis on two often-neglected qualities: simplicity and speed.

This browser -- a free, 6.2-megabyte download for Mac OS X 10.2 -- boots in a few blinks of the eye and displays pages faster than competing browsers.

Its customizable interface comes with a brushed-metal appearance that minimizes the number of controls you have to address at any one time: For example, as a page loads, its address bar doubles as a progress indicator, and its reload button temporarily turns into a stop button.

Safari includes a shortcut to Google searches in its top-right corner, which also remembers recent queries.

As you wander off into the Web, Safari's "snapback" button will appear in the address bar. Click it and you'll be whisked back to the last bookmark selected or the last address typed, whichever was more recent. This is perfect for digging your way out of complex sites, and I miss it every time I use another browser.

As any modern browser should, Safari can block unsolicited pop-up windows (if desired, you can re-enable pop-ups with a quick menu selection instead of a detour to Safari's streamlined preferences window). It also blocks cookie files that haven't been placed by the current site, which stops most Web advertisers from tracking you.

Safari's support for "tabbed browsing" is equally up to date: This popular option lets you view multiple Web pages within one frame, easily switching from one to the next.

Apple's biggest departure from browser tradition comes in Safari's bookmarks system. Instead of appending each new bookmark to an ever-longer menu -- which becomes essentially useless once it's taller than your screen -- Safari encourages you to organize your bookmarks among a set of smaller menus in a "bookmarks bar." For example, you can create one submenu that includes local weather forecasts and another for all of your financial sites. An "AutoTab" option will open such a group of bookmarks as a series of tabs.

Best of all, if you have two or more Macs, Apple's $100-a-year .Mac service will keep the same bookmarks in sync among those Macs. That's one of several ways that Safari smartly exploits Mac OS X's capabilities.

For instance, Safari's "forms auto-fill" shortcut, which pours your contact information into Web forms at the click of a button, doesn't require you to enter this data the first time. Instead, it copies it all from your own entry in Mac OS X's address book.

A related option stores Web-site passwords in the OS X Keychain, a master database that can itself be password-protected for extra security.

Safari can even use the system-wide spell checker to flag errors in Web forms, sparing you from riddling your Hotmail correspondence with typos.

In other words, bundling a Web browser with an operating system makes sense -- just as Microsoft said!

But unlike Microsoft's version of browser integration, Apple's preserves choice. Uninstalling Safari is as simple as dragging its icon to the Trash.

Furthermore, Safari's underlying Web-rendering code is free for everyone else to use -- even Windows developers.

That is because Apple used open-source code for that layer of the browser, which both allowed it to build on other people's work and required it to release its own improvements under the same "free software" terms.

The collaborative effort enables Safari to function on a Web in which many sites are written to work only in Internet Explorer. Nearly every site I tested in Safari functioned exactly as it should.

I found only two major exceptions: Text sometimes appeared garbled in the Web-mail interface of a Microsoft Outlook mail system, and I could not upload a picture to an eBay auction (a bug I saw in earlier versions of Safari that should have been fixed long ago, given that Safari offers a simple form to report bugs to Apple).

Windows and Linux users will have to borrow a Mac to appreciate all of Safari's elegance, but they can also try a new, non-Microsoft browser with some distinctly Safari-esque traits.

Mozilla Firebird, a browser-only offshoot of the Mozilla open-source Internet suite, features a similar focus on speed and simplicity and even looks like Safari, with its search-engine shortcut at the top right corner.

It came about when developers decided to ax Mozilla's non-browser components -- the e-mail client, address book, Web-page editor and Internet chat tools that many people never use -- and redo the browser core. An interface rewrite then wiped clean Mozilla's clutter; in particular, the grotesque preferences window is history.

But Firebird preserves Mozilla's Web-browsing utility, including pop-up blocking, tabbed browsing and the ability to save Web passwords.

Firebird is still in an early test stage (www.mozilla.org/projects/firebird), but I'm already considering making it my default browser. Mozilla's developers are thinking along the same lines; the next release of that software will be the last, after which they will focus their efforts on Firebird.

Web browsers are an interesting story for the first time in years. But when will Microsoft notice all this activity? When will Internet Explorer get the meaningful update it so desperately needs?

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro at rob@twp.com.