Don Melton: The Leader of Apple's Secret Safari Team

This article explores the origins of Apple's Safari web browser and identifies Don Melton as the leader of the original software engineering team that developed it in secret. It covers why Apple needed its own browser, how Melton assembled a small group of engineers to build the software using open-source foundations, and the strict secrecy protocols they followed until Safari's public debut in 2003.

Don Melton led the original software engineering team that secretly created the Safari web browser at Apple. A former Netscape engineer, Melton was hired by Apple in 2001 by Scott Forstall, who was then a senior director leading Mac OS X development. Immediately upon hiring him, Forstall tasked Melton with a top-secret mission: build a brand-new, fast, and native web browser for the Mac.

At the time, Apple relied on Microsoft's Internet Explorer for Mac as its default web browser, a stipulation of a 1997 five-year cross-licensing agreement between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. With that contract nearing its expiration, Jobs wanted Apple to control its own destiny on the web rather than rely on Microsoft or struggling third-party browsers.

Melton began the project, internally codenamed "Alexander" before being renamed Safari, entirely from scratch. To speed up development, he and his growing team evaluated several existing rendering engines. Ultimately, engineer Richard Williamson demonstrated the viability of KHTML and KJS, the open-source layout and JavaScript engines from the Linux-based KDE project. Melton chose this foundation because the codebase was clean, small, and standards-compliant. Apple's heavily modified version of this code eventually became known as WebKit.

To build the browser around this engine, Melton recruited a small, elite team of engineers. Key members of this original group included Ken Kocienda, Darin Adler, Maciej Stachowiak, and David Hyatt, the latter of whom Melton poached directly from the Mozilla project, where Hyatt had just co-created the browser that would become Firefox.

The development of Safari was treated like a black-ops project. The team worked in a locked area on the Apple campus, and Melton was forbidden from telling even his own wife what he was working on. When the engineers tested the browser on the live internet, they programmed it to lie about its identity in server logs, masquerading as Internet Explorer or Netscape so website administrators would not notice an unknown Apple browser visiting their pages.

When third-party developers from the open-source KDE project began to get suspicious of the quiet hires Apple was making from their community, Melton had to carefully manage communications to keep the project's true nature hidden.

Melton's leadership culminated on January 7, 2003, when Steve Jobs officially unveiled Safari as the "fastest browser on the Mac" at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco. Following the launch, Melton continued to lead the Safari and WebKit teams for several years before retiring from Apple in 2012.