During the early development of Safari, I didn’t just worry about leaking our secret project through Apple’s IP address or our browser’s user agent string. It also concerned me that curious gawkers on the outside would notice who I was hiring at Apple.

Other than a bit part in a documentary about Netscape that aired on PBS, I wasn’t known to anyone but a few dozen other geeks in The Valley. Of course, several of those folks were aware I was now at Apple and working on some project I wouldn’t say anything about. And it doesn’t take many people in this town to snowball a bit of idle speculation.

I found out later that Andy Hertzfeld, an Apple veteran who I worked with at Eazel, had figured it all out by the time I showed up for my first day to work on the browser on June 25, 2001. Andy was very insightful that way. But thankfully he was also quiet about it at the time.

Hiring Darin Adler, also ex-Apple and ex-Eazel, in the Spring of 2002 was likely visible to others in the industry since he was much more well known than me. But because Darin had never worked on a dedicated Web browser like I had, no one made the connection.

However, when I hired Dave Hyatt in July 2002, then guesses started flying fast.

While at Netscape, Dave built the Chimera (now known as Camino) browser for Mac OS X and co-created the project that would later become Firefox. Both of these applications were based on the Mozilla Gecko layout engine on which Dave also worked. He was a true celebrity in the Web browser world, having his hands in just about every Mozilla project.

So, during the Summer of 2002, several bloggers and tech websites speculated that Dave must be bringing Chimera to the Mac. Except that Chimera was already a Mac application and didn’t need to be ported. So what the hell was Dave doing at Apple? Building another Gecko-based Mac browser? No one knew. And none of this made much sense. Which is probably why the rumors subsided so quickly.

But people would remember all of this when Safari debu