Although taken for granted now, Apple didn’t release the first version of Safari until January 2003. Before that was a succession of interesting experiments to try. Those started with Netscape Navigator in 1994, which lasted until 2007, although by then it was little used on Macs.

Netscape is seen here in 2000, following my successful purchase of downloadable versions of Conflict Catcher and Suitcase from Casady & Greene’s online store.

Two years later, and I’m browsing Amazon’s listing of my never-published book that was slated for 31 March the following year. I’m so glad I never pre-ordered it.

Netscape had been at the front of browser development, leading with on-the-fly page display, cookies and JavaScript. But in 1996, it was challenged by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, and Apple’s more innovative Cyberdog. The latter was sadly abandoned the following year, leaving the way clear for Apple to replace the bundled Netscape with Internet Exploder, as it quickly became nicknamed.

This is Microsoft Internet Explorer in 2001, providing the front end to Mac OS X Server through Webmin.

Cookie settings in Explorer were highly detailed in 2005.

Many of us abandoned Internet Explorer for alternatives such as Camino. That had originated within Netscape as Chimera in 2002, based on its Gecko layout engine, with a native Mac OS X front end. The following year it was rebranded as Camino, and amazingly lasted until 2012.

There were other competitors, such as Omni Group’s OmniWeb, which had been developed for NeXTSTEP since 1995, then moved to Mac OS X until 2012.

This is OmniWeb in 2007, showing the different browsers it could identify itself as, including a single version of Safari 1.0.

In January 2003, Apple launched the first beta-release of its own browser, Safari, and bundled it in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther when it was released that October. Since then Safari has been a regular fixture in successive versions of Mac OS X, OS X, and macOS. For several years, it was the only browser on iOS and iPadOS.

This is Safari 1 showing the front page for Apple’s developer site in 2004, complete with the offer to download Xcode version 1.5 with dead code stripping as a new feature. That year, Mozilla Firefox was released as an alternative, and has continued to support Macs ever since.

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger came with Safari as the only bundled browser when it was released in April 2005, although it took Safari 2.0.4 in early 2006 before it was stable.

Page loading was slow in 2005, when Apple’s front page took a total of over 16 seconds to load fully, but that only used 6.8 MB of memory. By contrast, today Apple’s front page only takes a couple of seconds but requires over 200 MB.

There were times when the only way ahead with these early versions of Safari was to completely reset it, emptying its cache, and even removing all passwords and AutoFill text. This is Safari 2 in 2006.

Prominent among the plugins in 2006 was the dreaded Shockwave Flash, which had only recently been taken over by Adobe when it acquired Macromedia the previous year. Details of plugins are here being displayed on an internal web page within Safari 2.

Safari 3, bundled in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard in October 2007, brought the claim that it was then the fastest browser, but it was troubled by bugs and security problems at first.

Safari 3 had already grown extensive preferences, covering the use of plugins, Java, JavaScript and cookies, seen here in 2007.

Its successor, Safari 4, followed in the summer of 2009, ready for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, with further performance improvements, particularly in its JavaScript engine.

By 2009, Safari 4 was able to warn the user if it was about to visit a site blacklisted by the Google Safe Browsing Service. At least when that service was available. That year also saw Preview and Beta releases of Google Chrome, now Safari’s most serious competitor on Apple’s hardware.

Safari 5 was released a year later, in 2010, and was bundled in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion in 2011. This brought Reader mode and opened the door to third-party extensions.

Safari’s hidden Debug menu provided a collection of tools for web developers, and more recently has become the even more extensive Develop menu.

By the release of macOS 10.12 Sierra in 2016, Safari had reached version 10.

By 2016, close control over Adobe Flash Player had become critical, as a result of its frequent exploits, although it remained highly popular with content developers before Adobe finally killed it at the end of 2020.

Since 2021, with the release of macOS 12 Monterey, Safari 15 and its successors have been able to perform on-the-fly translation, as demonstrated here.

Safari is now the bundled browser in macOS, iOS, iPadOS and visionOS, and this year is set to leap in version number from 18 to 26 with the arrival of Tahoe and its sister OSes. It has been a long and sometimes troubled journey over those 22 years, and despite strong competition from Google Chrome and Chromium-based browsers, it remains the browser of first choice for a great many using Apple’s hardware products. I hope my screenshots have brought back more happy memories than traumatic moments.

Reference

Wikipedia.

Spotlight, the current search feature in macOS, does far more than find locally stored files, but in this brief history I focus on that function, and how it has evolved as Macs have come to keep increasingly large numbers of files.

Until early Macs had enough storage to make this worthwhile, there seemed little need. Although in 1994 there were precious few Macs with hard disks as large as 1 GB, networks could provide considerably more. That year Apple offered its first product in AppleSearch, based on a client-server system running over AppleShare networks, and in its Workgroup Servers in particular. This was a pioneering product that was soon accompanied by a local app, Find File, written by Bill Monk and introduced in System 7.5 that September.

Sherlock

The next step was to implement a similar architecture to AppleSearch on each Mac, with a service that maintained indexes of file metadata and contents, and a client that passed queries to it. This became Sherlock, first released in Mac OS 8.5 in 1998. As access to the web grew, this came to encompass remote search through plug-ins that worked with web search engines.

Those were expanded in Sherlock 2, part of Mac OS 9.0 from 1999 and shown above, and version 3 that came in Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar in 2002. The latter brought one of the more unseemly conflicts in Apple’s history, when developers at Karelia claimed Sherlock 3 had plagiarised its own product, Watson, which in turn had been modelled on Sherlock. Apple denied that, but the phrase being Sherlocked has passed into the language as a result.

Spotlight

Sherlock remained popular with the introduction of Mac OS X, but was never ported to run native on Intel processors. Instead, Apple replaced it with Spotlight in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, in April 2005.

Initially, the Spotlight menu command dropped down a search panel as shown here, rather than opening a window as it does now.

A Finder search window, precursor to the modern Find window, is shown in the lower left of this screenshot taken from Tiger in 2006.

Spotlight was improved again in Mac OS 10.5 Leopard, in 2007. This extended its query language, and brought support for networked Macs that were using file sharing.

This shows a rather grander Finder search window from Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard in 2009.

Search attributes available for use in the search window are shown here in OS X 10.9 Mavericks, in 2014.

Spotlight’s last major redesign came in OS X 10.10 Yosemite, in 2014, when web and local search were merged into Global Spotlight, the search window that opens using the Spotlight icon at the right end of the menu bar. With Global Spotlight came Spotlight (then Siri from macOS Sierra) Suggestions, and they have been accompanied by remote data collection designed to preserve the relative anonymity of the user.

This Finder window in OS X 10.10 Yosemite, in 2015, shows a more complex search in progress.

This shows a search in Global Spotlight in macOS 10.12 Sierra, in 2017.

Local Search in the Finder’s Find window can now use a wide variety of attributes, some of which are shown here, in macOS 10.13 High Sierra, in 2018. Below are search bars for several different classes of metadata.

Over the years, Spotlight’s features have become more divided, in part to safeguard privacy, and to deliver similar features from databases. Core Spotlight now provides search features within apps such as Mail and Notes, where local searches lack access.

Spotlight’s indexes are located at the root level of each indexed volume, in the hidden .Spotlight-V100 folder. Those are maintained by mdworker processes relying on mdimporter plugins to provide tailored access for different file types. If an mdimporter fails to provide content data on some or all of the file types it supports, those are missing from that volume’s indexes, and Spotlight search will be unsuccessful. This happened most probably in macOS Catalina 10.15.6, breaking the indexing of content from Rich Text files. That wasn’t fixed until macOS Big Sur 11.3 in April 2021.

Over the last few years, macOS has gained the ability to perform optical character recognition using Live Text, and to analyse and classify images. Text and metadata retrieved by the various services responsible are now included in Spotlight’s indexes. From macOS 13 Ventura in 2022, those services can take prolonged periods working through images and file types like PDF that include images they can process to generate additional content and metadata for indexing.

Those with large collections of eligible files have noticed sustained workloads as a result. Fortunately for those with Apple silicon Macs, those services, like Spotlight’s indexing, run almost exclusively on their Mac’s E cores, so have little or no effect on its ability to run apps. For those with Intel processors, though, this may continue to be troubling.

In less than 30 years, searching Macs has progressed from the basic Find File to Spotlight finding search terms in text recognised in photos, in almost complete silence. Even Spotlight’s 20th birthday passed just over a month ago, on 29 April, without so much as an acknowledgment of its impact.