Apple's Safari Web Browser Comes Out Of Beta, Now Officially 1.0

by , 4:00 PM EDT, June 23rd, 2003

At today's WWDC keynote, Steve Jobs announced that Apple's Safari Web browser is now officially version 1.0, completing the "wildly successful" beta program. According to Apple, the Safari beta was downloaded nearly 5 million times since it was announced on January 7th, 2003. From now on, all newly introduced Macintosh computers will include Safari as the default browser.

In addition to Safari 1.0, Apple has released a Safari SDK (Software Development Kit) to allow developers to embed Safari's rendering engine in their applications. From Apple:

Apple today introduced Safari 1.0, completing the wildly successful beta program which had nearly five million downloads since its initial release on January 7, 2003. Safari has become the browser of choice for millions of Mac users and will be the default browser for all newly introduced Macintosh computers, starting with the Power Mac G5 announced today. Apple also released a software development kit that allows developers to embed the Safari HTML rendering engine directly into their applications.

The fastest web browser ever created for the Mac, Safari re-energizes the browser category through innovations like built-in Google search; SnapBack to instantly return to search results; a completely new way to name, organize and present bookmarks; tabbed browsing; and automatic "pop-up" ad blocking.

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Based on KHTML from KDE's Konqueror open source project, the Safari rendering engine delivers the best performance and standards compatibility available on the Mac platform. Apple will continue to work closely with the open source community and share its ongoing optimizations to the KHTML code.

Safari is now available free of charge from Software Update and Apple's Safari page. The Safari SDK can be obtained from the Apple Developer Connection site.

Apple