Why Slashdot owes Apple an apology

Sam Varghese
Monday, 03 March 2008 19:23

Opinion and Analysis

Does the fact that Apple has a well-developed operating system based on UNIX rile some people who claim to be FOSS boosters? I'd like to think it doesn't but last week I noticed something on the American technology news accumulator site Slashdot that really made me wonder.
When you have a headline reading "Mac OS X Secretly Cripples Non-Apple Software" it catches the eye. And when the sub-text says "... Apparently, Apple is using some undocumented APIs that give Safari a significant performance advantage over other browsers" that tends to make you sit up and take even more notice.

The parallel that comes to mind immediately that of a certain company in Redmond which has one set of APIs for the public and a second set for its own developers, giving the latter a definite advantage over outsiders.

I was taken in too - I asked my 12-year-old, an avid Mac user to read it.

But on perusing it closely, it becomes apparent that this headline and the sub-text are both woefully wrong. A sub-editor would have been sacked for this kind of offence.

A Firefox developer, Vladimir Vukicevic, found an undocumented feature in WebKit , a web browser engine that Apple uses in its Safari browser. Using this feature, Safari was outperforming Firefox on the Mac in some aspects. This developer wrote a long post about it on his blog.

WebKit is an open source project which is released under the LGPL and BSD licences. Apple developers have tweaked parts of the code - as they are entitled to - in order to optimise the performance of Safari. These geeks know the internals of their own operating system and also the nitty-gritty of their hardware. Hence they can tweak things for the Mac safely in a way that an outsider cannot.