“By the time I reached my office, I liked the name. Really liked it. I was committed. I could imagine seeing ‘Safari’ in the Mac OS X dock. I had to tell the team right away and, if necessary, convince them that they liked it too. Fortunately, and to their credit, they didn’t need much convincing.” Like I said – I love stories like this. Never liked the name ‘Safari’, though.
I guess iBrowse was never really an option since a browser with that name existed already for some years on the Amiga:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBrowse
Adrian
Yes, I remembered that too. Sad to see it died.
It should still be on my Amiga 1200.
That didn’t really stop Apple with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_iPhone or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_IOS
When I first heard the name Safari, I thought it sounded kind of stupid. Still do actually.
I don’t even dislike the browser all the much. But the name….
There once was a Mosaic in AMaya prophecy found by a Navigator on the WorldWideWeb. Then an Opera singing Explorer on Safari found out that it was made out of Chrome, then came a Konqueror and took the entire Flock of depicted Firefoxe(s), Firebird(s), Seamonkey(s) and Lynx from the artwork. He left only the Arachne behind for all to enjoy.
iCab not stand it, it made me a Maxt(h)on of sad.
But i try to stay netpositive since i am a true Voyager. lol
Edited 2012-12-21 01:31 UTC
While drinking some HotJava
Were you sad because you had no Cyberdog to keep you company?
St Jobs considered calling the browser ‘Freedom’. Oh, the iRony.
Most browser names are a bit silly I think.
If we call the world wide web just “web”, wouldn’t it make sense to call the browser “Spider”?
Okay, it will probably put people off who don’t like spiders (I’ll admit that includes me, but I do not kill them), but it would be a very fitting name as spiders are the only ones that can move about webs.
Or if people “surf” the web, why not call it “Surfboard”?
I think you completely forgot Galeon Browser
Mostly OSNews covers IOS vs Android type of Articles or something on Patents. Rarely gems like these show up here and its what makes the site interesting.
One such article was on the Pinball
Edited 2012-12-21 09:10 UTC
I liked the story. But… OMG this one sentence near the beginning almost made me vomit.
“I wasn’t in the room when the heavens split asunder and angels sounded forth as a choir singing that three-syllable benediction.”
It’s a name. It’s how we refer to a product. It doesn’t carry an awkward connotation that makes it embarrassing to mention. It doesn’t have a single letter prefix or other phonemic atrocity that makes it awkward to say. It doesn’t have camel case or otherwise odd capitalization that breaks with writing conventions.
Apparently they were saving that for atrocity known as iWeb – which is incidentally one of the worst website editors ever devised. It’s like Apple’s developers looked at spaghetti code produced by Dreamweaver or Frontpage, and then thought to themselves “Pfft, that’s nothing, we can generate much, MUCH worse output than that.”
iWeb: the only reason I’ve ever had to use an OCR program to get the body text from a goddamn’d webpage.
I guess Safari is a metaphor, since the web is “wild” and out of Apple’s control.
Explorer, Navigator also mean something related to what a browser does, look for stuff, hence I think there pretty good descriptive names. Now that I think about it, I think a lot, if not most of MS and Apple app names seem to be pretty sane and sensible.
Now if you want some freaking idiotic asinine names, look at most of the KDE apps.
Thinking of it: On Windows, I always have to “explore” the filesystem since it’s a mess. I like Find[er|ing] things a lot more ..