When someone on the team would really annoy me about needing to know the final name, I would often say something like, “I’ve just heard from Scott Forstall and it’s ‘iBrowse’ for sure.” Which really meant, “Don’t bug me with that shit right now.” This is how to endear yourself to your engineers. Then someone floated the “iBrowse” name, which became part of “an elaborate joke that appeared on our cryptic team shirt”. Plus, the candidate names “seemed to get worse the closer we got to shipping”.įor over a year, the internal name for the browser application was “Alexander.” Not only had we gotten very used to calling it that, the string “Alexander” was all over the code and buried in its resources. The team then considered a bunch of other names that all sounded “awful” to Don. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one in the room with that concern. Then “Freedom” came up and Steve “spent some time trying that one out on all of us”.Īccording to Don’s blog post, he managed to convince Jobs to move “Freedom” off the candidate list:Īll I could think about was, “Please don’t let us name the browser after a feminine hygiene product!” But cooler heads and filthier minds prevailed. When the time came to pick a name for the software, “Steve just started saying some names out loud” to see how they felt in his mouth and to his ears. One programmer who worked on the Safari project shares an anecdote describing how he persuaded Jobs to drop the “Freedom” name as it sounded like a “feminine hygiene product”…įormer Apple engineer Don Melton worked alongside Apple’s late co-founder Steve Jobs on the WebKit project that would power the company’s own browser. He also spent some time trying “Freedom” because he liked the sound of it and how it signified Apple’s freedom from Microsoft and Internet Explorer. Steve Jobs apparently considered a bunch of silly names for Apple’s browser that included “Freedom”, “Alexander” and “iBrowse” before settling with “Safari”. Though it’s now taken for granted, the Safari browser was almost named “Freedom”.
0 kommentar(er)
