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Nokia Develops a New Browser on Apple WebKit
Althazzar writes "Nokia has built a new browser for their Symbian system based on the WebKit open source project from Apple, released last week. "Apple is pleased to assist Nokia in creating their new Series 60 browser based on the same KHTML open source technology that powers Apple's Safari"."
If apple was actually working with them on this, or if they just are using the recently released webkit code from apple.
This way the three groups, Nokia, KDE, and Apple, will be working on making one browser engine perfect, rather than working on two very similar systems that, really, have no major advantages over one-another.
Symbian has little relationship with OS X/OpenStep. It strikes me if this was easy for Nokia to do, it should be architecturally reasonable to port it to a KDE environment.
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I had thought WebKit had some nontrivial tyings into Cocoa. Is WebKit that neatly separable from Cocoa? Does it use qt internally still?
So dosn't that mean that the Nokia 60 browser is opensource too? Wonder where I can get the source code or if they'll bother to provide it. If anyone finds a link to it let me know.
Maybe they can return the favor by being more Mac friendly in their desktop and sync software rollouts.
I have recently "discovered" the series 60 platform and I am really pleased with it. I was so happy with it that I was able to dump my Treo for a 6620. Finally, a real multitaksting smartphone alternative (non-msft). It's the best thing since sliced bread. Now if they could just give OS X some love.
Who is General Failure, and why is he reading my hard disk?
What happened to the minimo project? I thought that Nokia was supposedly funding this project for use on its phones. Is this an apparant shift or just a bad memory on my part?
A little learning never hurt anyone.
Opera is available on the competitor's phone (Qualcomm) on the Brew platform. So, I don't suppose Nokia made it better, they just didn't have Opera available to them.
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This is great news. The more people using KHTML based browsers the better for website compatibility. I think having 3 browser engines around with non-insignificant market share would be great.
Gosh, so it's sort of the bastard offspring of KDE, GNOME, and Apple. How very odd. I wonder if this will mean GNOME will get a webkit based browser in the near future.
I wonder how many people would have predicted that GNOME would gain the most from Apple taking up KHTML? Sure, we aren't there yet, but it begins to look possible. How very very odd.
Jedidiah.
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Yes they do. According to Opera Software's first quarter earnings, they get three times more revenue from licensing their browser for various pocket devices, than from selling the desktop version for Windows and Linux.
PuTTY+Lynx is my web browser.
Pictures only take more time to view, and most of our WAP/GPRS providers charge per kB.
The easy part was getting the brain out, but the hard part was getting the brain out.
Actually, the primary use of a phone is to send and receive text messages. Now that flat rate internet access is getting reasonable, that will soon be the secondary use and since it will be moving into the #2 position from dead last, I guess everything else will be moving down. That should put "making phone calls" around 5 or 6.
Of course it could just be me. I really hate talking on the fucking phone. And it costs too much in Japan anyway.
Symbian libc support isn't that bad: there are bugs (in sprintf printing 64 bit integers, for example), but in general it works pretty well. Good enough that you'd probably only have to use S60 libs for directly UI related code.
Has anyone noticed that no matter how cool a phone is, it is usually unavailable in the U.S.?
Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, and so on all keep coming out with killer phones, and they are completely unavailable from regular American channels. The only way to get most of them is to give hundreds and hundreds of dollars plus your credit card information to some fly-by-night, grey-market operation based in who-knows-where. Much of the time (judging by what I've read in reviews), the result is that you get some Chinese-language phone and no response from customer service.
Why the lack of cool phones in the U.S. when Europe and Asia have such a great selection of the latest and greatest?
Sure, we don't have third generation networks here... but we still appreciate cool phones. WTF is up here?
P.S. And no, the Sony-Ericsson S710a is not a cool phone. It *looks* cool, but has such horrendous design flaws as to be mostly unusable.
They did gave a large handout to Mozilla. And they do use, and will be using Opera as a browser in their phones. The reason why they are spreading their money and resources is to increase competition. By having three camps developing browsers for phones you get more competition, more innovation and more choices. In other words Opera can't rest or it will soon find itself phased off. The other reason I think is that they want to speed the development of phone browsers in case MS would come up with better phone browser. And we all know that they won't be selling their browser with out their OS. And finally, we are talking about Nokia research here. They are wonderfull in spending and investing money in start-ups and new technologies. It really is pennies to them. Actually they get much more back, because of publicity and maybe more positive view in the minds of developers. Just my 10 cents.
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Wonder if Nokia will fix the animated .GIF display bugs that Safari on Tiger has? I can reliably crash Safari looking at one, and there's another that doesn't display on the web page it's part of, but will display if loaded by itself.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
T-Mobile changed its data pricing in the past year or so. If you subscribed to unlimited data before they changed the price, you got to keep the 3.99 per month rate. It came in very handy this past March, when I was checking NCAA basketball scores every few minutes...
As a recently former Symbian developer. When I say this, after 3 years, it's very much worth celebrating, Symbian development is the worst experience of my life, including having to have my dog put to sleep in the comparison.
In any case, the Series 60 platform includes mostly bitmapped fonts and for "Performance Reasoning" do not bother even trying to make a decent font system. They have a painfully slow glyph renderer and their support for path rendering in general is pathetic. Most Symbian (specifically nokia) phones are using extremely underpowered processors and antialiasing is just not an option.
Some asian Series 60 phones ship with a commercial font renderer, but the font they include is of a proprietary format and is missing a large amount of characters.
Nokia and Symbian try to take the route of reinventing every wheel they can. They typically try to rewrite everything from the ground up using average developers.
So, I wouldn't blame Opera for these problems. The fact that a browser like Opera can run on such an incredibly bad operating system is a huge thing in the first place.
I really wish Nokia the best with the KHTML stuff, but I've seen many attempts, even serious ones, to implement an embedded KHTML. The thing about KHTML is that it performs as well as it does due to their large memory usage. They have an internal DOM tree which is frigging beautiful and clean, but it is also LARGE!!!! I love Safari and use it all the time, I don't mind having a gig of RAM in a machine to make the browser fly, but KHTML just doesn't perform on lower memory systems. The other point of interest is that the rendering engine of KHTML might not be suitable for the non-CSS alterations to page layout that makes the difference between Opera and other small screen systems.