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by jm4 2384 days ago
Nope. It was a fork of WebKit which was a fork of KHTML, the engine powering Konqueror. KHTML was developed by the KDE team.

Edit: It was widely speculated that Apple would use gecko for Safari and a shock when they announced they would use the relatively little known KHTML engine. The decision was based on KHTML having much cleaner code. I haven't looked at the Mozilla code in many years, but it was pretty gnarly back then. Lots of old cruft from the Netscape days. In comparison, KHTML was beautiful.
2 comments
cpeterso 2384 days ago
Ken Kocienda's book "Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs" has more details about the Safari team's evaluation of Mozilla code and KHTML. Ken was engineer #2 on the Safari team.
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rusk 2384 days ago
I went looking into this, and it appears that I was confused. Google was a big contributor to Firefox in the early naughties, which is the period I was thinking of. Chrome didn't come out until a good while later.
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