So it turns out that Hyatt is part of the Safari team at Apple. This is excellent news for Safari, as Hyatt was a major player in the development of Chimera. It does, however, make me wonder even more why gecko wasn't chosen as the rendering engine. Having stolen Dave away from Mozilla, did Apple not want to rock the boat even more by having him continue to work on Moz? Is it an issue with the licenses the two projects work with? Is it really just technically based (one engine is smaller than the other)?
No matter what the deal is, there are two things of interest here: 1) Hyatt's site will become a good place to get up to date information about the browser and 2) his previous work on Mozilla will lead to speculation about Safari. In any case, I like Hyatt, and I look forward to hearing even more about Safari from him now that he's graduated from having to gaurd the balcony, that is...
I talked with an Apple Systems Engineer today and he told me that they where able to keep the file size of Safari down because it is based around OpenGL and Quartz which are native to OSX as of release 10.2 Jaguar. He wasn't able to tell me why they decided not to use Gecko though.
Count me in please.