How Apple ‘punk’d the entire crowd’ when announcing Safari

Former Safari engineer Don Melton has already told us what it was like to keep the browser project a secret, as well as revealing that it was once known as “Freedom.” But in his latest post, Melton details what it was like when Safari was finally revealed at Macworld 2003. He recounts concerns over technical problems and watching Steve Jobs rehearse his keynote, as well as sitting in the crowd seeing the presentation along with everyone else. “For the entire six minutes and 32 seconds that Steve used Safari on stage,” he says, “I don’t remember taking a single breath.” But he says the most satisfying moment of all was when Jobs revealed what the team used to build Safari. “KHTML may have been a bigger surprise than Apple doing a browser at all,” he says. “We had punk’d the entire crowd.”