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"."

Comments

Wither KHTML?

[squiggleslash]

I wonder if it'd be worth the Konqueror people taking WebKit/etc and porting it back to KDE, rather than trying to keep up with WebKit in KHTML when the latter is obviously having problems because of slight architectural differences.

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.

That's quite strange

[Anonymous Coward]

I had thought WebKit had some nontrivial tyings into Cocoa. Is WebKit that neatly separable from Cocoa? Does it use qt internally still?

Re:That's quite strange

[Elwood P Dowd]

1. Yes, they meant WebCore not WebKit
2. There's a bit of mailing list activity from people working on porting WebKit (and the internal qt-alike), and the Apple folks have been encouraging.

Dunno who's doing the work, because I'm not watching CVS or bugzilla or nothing. It sounds like they'll merge the existing GTK Webkit port first. Some dude says he's going to pound on it 'till it compiles in Windows and swears he'll keep it up for a year. Dunno who these people are, so I don't know how much salt to take anything with.

But the notable thing is that the Apple employees are down with WebKit getting ported to Windows, and that would imply that they will try to keep that port maintained.

Mildly offtopic, but interesting, right?

hmmmm.

[Kaamoss]

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.

Return the favor?

[DeepFried]

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.

Minimo

[brolewis]

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?

Good

[pherthyl]

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.

Re:Hmm

[kaarlov]

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.

Re:But why?

[Iloinen Lohikrme]

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.