Apple Terminates Safari Seed Program

coolmacdude writes "This morning Safari beta v67 was leaked to the Internet. Because this is the third time it has happened (v62 and v64 were leaked), Apple has apparantly had enough and decided to terminate the seed program that provided unreleased beta verisons to selected developers. In a email sent to all developers and posted on Mike Wendland's blog, Apple says: 'Due to Safari 67 postings to the internet, we have closed the Safari Seed project. We know that the majority of you are not responsible for the leaks to the internet, and we sincerely appreciate your feedback, time and effort with this project.'"

Comments

Who woulda thunk it

[jbellis]

given apple's history of siccing lawyers on sites that dare to post pics of the latest & greatest before they're officially unveiled, the only surprising thing is that it lasted this long...

Re:Who woulda thunk it

[Lewisham]

Actually, Apple has a pretty good past record of "leaking" pre-release code. The Register has gotton pretty blaise about it all. You only know if something shouldn't have happenend if heads publically roll, like the time the mirror face PowerMac designs were released to eWeek.

I'm Confused...

[terraformer]

Doesn't it make more sense for them to have as many testers as possible on pre-release builds? This way they find potential issues missed through the undoubtedly small QA team on the project.

Re:I'm Confused...

[disneyfan1313]

It does and that's why there are public betas. Once the software gets out there in the open apple becomes liable (not from a legal but from a public relations standpoint) from any damage or drama the software causes. Would you like your software to be labled instable or buggy simply because someone in corprate wanted more testers out there?

Re:I'm Confused...

[ydlman]

Another main reason that Apple may not want all these beta builds out is that they may contain features that may or may not make it into a 1.0 release. Perhaps they wanted to try out feature X (say tabs) and find that it doesn't work the way that they had planned and they don't want it in a 1.0 release. But now if they release 1.0 without a feature that has been in the seeds the public uproar will be incredible.

Re:I'm Confused...

[90XDoubleSide]

Just go on the Apple support forums and look at how many people are compaining about the bugs in leaked builds. If people actually had the level of common sense you're giving thhem credit for, this wouldn't be a problem, but sadly they don't.

Why not release it on ADC?

[ShatteredDream]

How hard would it be for them to put in the developer builds a little code to pop up a splash screen everytime that safari loads that reminds the user that it is a developer, not end-user build unless they disable that in the preferences?

Perhaps they should look at Mozilla's approach

[gusnz]

With the KHTML engine still undergoing internal tweaking for better DOM/CSS/etc support, I think Apple should look to the Mozilla project for their approach to browser development. Why not publicly release nightly betas, so users can post feedback on development as with BugZilla? Users don't expect the nightlies to be perfect, but it would keep the tweakers (and web designers like me) happy, and the developers would get a lot more feedback on their progress, whereas most casual users can happily download milestone releases.

Otherwise, the standards compliance of the browser will possibly be delayed (all the esoteric little implementation issues, especially with CSS and DHTML). After all, many eyeballs results in better code, especially with something as complex as a web browser.

Leaked builds probably helped Safari

[RedX]

Without getting into the neverending "tabbed browsing" argument, I'll go out on a limb and say that these leaked builds will probably help Safari's marketshare in the long run. In browsing various Mac messageboards before and after v60 was leaked, I can tell you that many people dumped Camino the moment that tabs were discovered in Safari's debug menu. Had Safari's tabs been kept under wraps until the next public beta, Camino would have only matured and captured more users, which in the long run could've decreased the number of users using Safari. Of course this is all speculation. And I won't even get into the benefit that Apple realized by having a larger user base testing these builds.

easter eggs

[Anonymous Coward]

They should have done that trick where each developer gets a slightly different copy, possibly each having a different easter egg embedded inside. All they then have to do is download the version from the internet and trigger the easter egg to find out which copy was leaked and cut that developer off.

--
Dreamweaver Templates

I disagree with the crowd on this

[Henry V .009]

1) They should have known that it would be available for download on the net as soon as they handed it out. If they didn't take that into account before starting the program they're idiots.

2) A lot of people justify Apple here by posting the standard shit about it being terrible for the public to see an unfinished product. This is wrong and silly. Most people who come across this type of thing and are willing to install a beta are a) warez people who aren't gonna buy it anyway, or b) early adopters who are itching to try it out and are going to buy it no matter what.

3) And finally some people are going to whine about the humanity of programmers having to see their beautiful program that they love like a child being stolen by the masses. Tell them to stop whining. The programmers are wage slaves. If the company earns more money because of massive warezing (that should be 'When the company inevitably earn more...') the programmers should shut up about the hurt to their souls and get back to fulfilling their contracts.

Software companies act like this because they are run by idiots. You have no clue of the true magnitude of the crass stupidity they are capable of.

And Apple just likes to throw temper tantrums. They probably lost more customers by canceling this program and making a stink than they would have lost by having betas escape into the wild.

Re:I disagree with the crowd on this

[JohnG]

"And Apple just likes to throw temper tantrums. They probably lost more customers by canceling this program and making a stink than they would have lost by having betas escape into the wild."

Considering Safari is a free download I don't think they are complaining much about lost customers.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Why didnt they (Apple) take the same approach as..

[Anonymous Coward]

many game developers take when using a seed program.

All seeds are digitally signed in one or more ways, so that when the seed is found on the internet, the guilty party can be identified and removed from the program.

Another case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Watermarking, unique copies, etc.

[isj]

I think it is quite interesting that people recommend that Apple should have embedded watmermarks, unique identifcation, steganography and other stuff in the beta download to identify who leaked the copy.

Isn't this the same posters that normally oppose DRM? :-)

Nerr, duh?

[DAQ42]

Okay, I think some of you need a little education on how Apple operates.
First off, the whole beta program fro Safari is/was managed by a small team. Second, that team has a goal to release either the next public beta or the full 1.0 release by June 30th, 2003. You can verify this by opening up the terminal and navigating to /Applications/Safari.app/Content/MacOS/ and typing in the command 'strings Safari | grep June'. You will see two line in the binary that read "Safari Beta will expire on June 30, 2003.
Safari Beta expired on June 30, 2003."
This means that they are on a deadline and have a lot of work to do. A lot of people who have posted here are suggesting that they should do MORE work and add easter eggs/stenographics/blah-blah/security tracking to the seeded releases. Now you tell me, does that sound like a good way to reach a deadline? Especially one that is hard coded into the binary of the public beta? Now you could argue that putting in an arbitrary deadline is a "bad idea" or whatever, but I think it's a great way to keep a project both on track and managable. Pressure to perform and all that rot.
The other thing a lot of people are apparently misguided in thinking is that Apple was naive about releasing these developer seeds. For this you have to understand a little bit about Apple's corporate culture and social philosophy. While you may not agree with it, I and a lot of others, think it's a great experiment and helps move our culture along. To understand thier philosophy, just look at Apple's public stance on music piracy. They have put in place some very basic and easily defeatable mechanisms with the iPod that prevents users from sharing music freely with thier iPod. They have not completely crippled your ability to share music, however they do put s little sticker on the iPod's that says "Don't steal music." They have also publicly stated in many debates about music piracy that it is a social problem, not a technological one, and that technology will not solve the issue. So in that statement, they have made reasonably clear that they don't really want to spend a lot of time working on something that they see as inevitable.
They also want to trust those that they sign up for the seed programs. If you can't trust your testers to give you good reliable feedback, you are wasting your time and effort and you won't get your project completed or your bug fixed.
Now the thing with the Safari seeds is that they gave the seed users 3 chances, basically 3 strikes, your out. After the 3rd strike, they pulled the program because they saw it as more detrimental that useful. I'm sure they started getting an unmanagable amount of negative feedback or duplicate bug reports, or even worse, useless ones because all these people that downloaded the seeds that were not part of the seed program probably started sending in incomplete bug reports or even worse, stupid things like "the thingy with the buttons, doesn't work on my puter, fix it now assholes", or something to that effect. This means that those managing the bug database and trying to glean useful information or even just track any real bugs now have to sift through thousands of shit reports. Needle in haystack time.
Any of this sound reasonable.
And finally, the most telling thing would be the reports on rumor sites. Apple hates rumor sites. They are counter productive to thier business (believe it or now, they are). If someone reads on a rumor site that such and such feature is missing/broken/doesn't work or whatever on a rumor site, and bases thier judgement on that rumor sites word (I know, stupid people, but it does happen, I have plenty of ad hom proof), they end up loosing a potential customer, or thier market image gets tarnished.
I don't know about most of you, but these are the reasons that I see Apple's decision to pull the plug as both necessary and smart on Apple's part. Argue all you want about "the way it should be" or whatever, but these are the realities of this business. If you