In Pictures: B is for browser - a homage to 12 Web greats

S is for Safari, which you'd hardly call sublime Unless you think of IE Mac, which froze up all the time

Microsoft sank a lot of money into Apple at the end of the '90s, so Cupertino didn't have to look far for a browser maker for Mac OS and, later, OS X. But IE for the Mac was a freeze-happy crash monkey from the get-go, and stayed that way till 2003, when Apple dumped it in favor of its own browser.

Apple picked well this time. Safari (shown here: 2003 beta) was born out of KHTML, a stable seven-year-old browsing engine on which a quirky Unix and Windows browser/file manager called Konqueror was built.

Safari's nothing very special except that it's not IE for Mac, and it's right there on the dock of your Mac and iDevice. In browsing as in real estate, it's all about location.