[gonehome]

Ken Kocienda writes about the origin of Safari in Creative Selection [0].

It started as a Konqueror fork mostly because Jobs wanted a browser on OS X and Ken was initially tasked with it (back then the mac had IE for mac). One person writing a browser from scratch even back then seemed an impossible challenge so he took a look to see if he could use most of Konqueror as an initial starting base.

[0]: The book has some interesting stories, but I find it hard to recommend because it's weirdly written for an extremely non-technical audience (using grandma like analogies to explain basic concepts, the analogies are so basic they do more to obscure than explain - e.g. the filesystem is like a 'cabinet for files'). It doesn't often get into the weeds of the interesting technical details - which is disappointing since 90% of readers are probably technical. The stories in it are still good though and Ken has a lot of insight into the iPhone development story since he was there.

[irskep]

Minor correction: Ken Kocienda didn't do the Konqueror port. He was working on getting Gecko to build and a teammate got Konqueror working in X11 before Ken even got Gecko to compile.

[gonehome]

Ah you're right I was misremembering (read it a while ago) - thanks for the correction.

[Arelius]

KHTML was a pretty viable alternative to the mess that was Gecko at the time. And there were already some (underserved) alternative platform ports in-progress at the time.