Exposé
Every window shrunk to fit, none overlapping, on a single keystroke. It is the rare feature that arrived complete and needed almost no revision afterwards.
At launch
- Announced
- June 2003
- Released
- October 24, 2003
- Follows
- Jaguar (10.2)
- Followed by
- Tiger (10.4)
- Architecture
- PowerPC
Overview
The release that admitted you had thirty windows open.
Exposé did one thing: pressed a key and shrank every open window until they all fitted on screen at once, with none of them overlapping. Press it again and they flew back. It solved a problem every desktop had and none had addressed.
Panther also brought Fast User Switching with its rotating-cube animation, FileVault encrypting a home folder, iChat AV with video, and Safari in the box for the first time — Apple's own browser, released in January of that year, now the default.
Exposé
One key, and everything fits.
F9 for every window, F10 for the current application's, F11 to sweep them all aside and reveal the desktop. Twenty years on, it is still in macOS — renamed, folded into Mission Control, but the same idea and the same gesture.
Every open window, tiled without overlap
Features
What shipped.
A hundred and fifty new features, Apple said. These are the ones that stuck.
FileVault
Encrypted your home folder into a sparse disk image, unlocked at login. Full-disk encryption would have to wait for Lion.
At launch
Fast User Switching
Two people logged in at once, swapping with a rotating cube animation that existed largely because the GPU could now do it.
At launch
Safari
Apple's own browser, shipped in the box for the first time, with tabbed browsing and a rendering engine forked from KHTML that became WebKit.
At launch
iChat AV
Video and audio calls in the messaging app, with the three-dimensional conference room that made group video calls look like a Pixar short.
At launch
New Finder
Brushed metal, a sidebar with places and volumes, and a much faster list view. Contentious then, standard now.
At launch
Font Book
Installing, previewing and disabling fonts without a third-party manager, which had been a genuine gap for designers on the platform.
At launch
Preview
Rewritten to open PDFs several times faster than Acrobat, which is why a great many people stopped installing Acrobat at all.
At launch
Xcode
Project Builder became Xcode, with distributed builds and fix-and-continue debugging. The name has stuck for two decades.
At launch
Safari
The browser Apple wrote because it could not rely on anyone else.
Internet Explorer for Mac had been the default since a 1997 agreement with Microsoft, and by 2002 it was visibly stagnating. Apple started again from KHTML, the engine in KDE's Konqueror, chosen because its source was small enough for a team to read in full.
The fork became WebKit, open-sourced in 2005. It went on to power Safari on iPhone, and then — by way of Chromium — a large majority of the browsers in the world.
Desktop
Blue, softening.
Panther's default swapped Jaguar's fine arcs for broad soft curves — the same palette, a gentler hand.
Aqua BlueSoft curves, deep fieldThere was only ever one. A system-wide Dark Mode did not arrive until Mojave in 2018, so this page's light and dark appearances are ours, not Apple's — the switch in the corner still works, but the desktop of the day looked like this and only this.
Lineage
Where it sits.
Apple named ten releases after big cats before moving to California in 2013.
Compatibility
Machines that could run it.
Panther dropped the original beige Power Mac G3 and required FireWire, which quietly retired the oldest supported machines.
- Processor
- PowerPC G3, G4 or G5
- Memory
- 128 MB
- Disk space
- 1.5 GB
- Requires
- Built-in FireWire
- Excludes
- Beige Power Mac G3