Former Apple Safari Engineering Manager, Don Melton (a hire by Scott Forstall), continues to share his anecdotal accounts of his experience working for the Cupertino company. This time around, he shares what it was like when Steve Jobs announced Safari to the world at MacWorld back in 2003:
Steve started the Safari presentation with, “So, buckle up.” And that’s what I wished I could do then — seatbelt myself down. Then he defined one of our product goals as, “Speed. Speed.” So, I tensed up. Not that I didn’t agree, of course. I just knew what was coming soon:
Demo time.
And for the entire six minutes and 32 seconds that Steve used Safari on stage, I don’t remember taking a single breath. I was thinking about that network failure during rehearsal and screaming inside my head, “Stay online, stay online!” We only had one chance to make a first impression.
After it was all said and done, Melton emailed the KDE team to thank them for their open source KHMTL layout engine Apple implemented into Safari, which we know today as WebKit. Check out the entire post by Melton here–it’s a fascinating read.
Below is the video of Jobs announcing Safari back in 2003 (starts at 55 minutes):
Another great video of Steve Jobs announcing products with his original flair. The 10 year anniversary of Safari was less than a week ago on January 4th, 2013.
