From Newsgroup: comp.sys.mac.system
In article <be0rft$ftu$
1@nets3.rz.RWTH-Aachen.DE>,
Christoph Kukulies <
kuku@accms33.physik.rwth-aachen.de> wrote:
I'm wondering what a suitable platform would be to develop
applications (plugins) for Safari?
AFAIK Safari is based on Mozilla. What would be required to build
Safari from sources? I'm capable of building mozilla under my BSD OS (FreeBSD), so an OS X appears to me as a possible platform. But can
these binaries be run on other Mac OS platforms?
Safari isn't a Mozilla variant. Things are a bit more complex.
Safari is a (closed-source) Apple-developed browser shell that makes
use WebKit. WebKit is a high-level (closed-source) Apple-developed
Objective-C wrapper for WebCore. WebCore is a lower-level (open-source) Apple-developed Objective-C wrapper for KHTML. KHTML is, of course, the open-source rendering engine used by Konquerer.
Anyway, the upshot is that you can't build Safari from (publicly
available) source, though you can build some interesting parts of it.
But there's really no reason to build Safari from source. The Safari application can be extended by writing plug-ins that conform to the traditional Mac OS browser plug-in specification, or by making use of
the more generalized mechanisms for extending Cocoa applications. And
if you want to make use of Safari's engine in your applications, all
you need to do is write a few lines of code calling the WebKit API.
Everything above KHTML is firmly tied to OS X, making extensive use of
APIs that aren't available on other platforms. In fact, Safari won't
even work on 10.1 -- it requires 10.2 or later.
--
"First, let me make it very clear, poor people aren't necessarily killers. Just
because you happen to be not rich doesn't mean you're willing to kill."
-- George W. Bush in Washington, D.C. on May 19, 2003 --- Synchronet 3.18b-Win32 NewsLink 1.113