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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"."
I have a built in web browser in my phone, but I never fired it up because it has fees that go along with its use.
God spoke to me.
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.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I had thought WebKit had some nontrivial tyings into Cocoa. Is WebKit that neatly separable from Cocoa? Does it use qt internally still?
Which is based upon the Webcore released by NOKIA not long ago. Here is a Screenshot
And further Information can be found here.
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.
I do suppose Opera has more experience in fitting web pages to small screens. Have they made it better?
How long until Cringely announces the details of the upcoming Apple/Intel/Nokia merger?
I hate the one hundred and twenty character limit for signatures with an all-enveloping, all-destroying, incredible pass
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.
This is a blow for the Opera for Mobile product, it seems to me. I wonder how usable this new browser is without a proxying component like the one used by the Reqwireless WebViewer or even the BlackBerry's built-in browser?
EricJ2ME acronyms defined
With the open-sourcing of web/kit/webcore/whatever, will (can?) someone make a version for XP?
This has been out for a while, i've been using gtk-webcore for the last two months on my Slackware box.
you can get it from here and there's lots of other interesting tidbits of information on that site.
save the GNUs!
Gtk+ WebCore seems to be made at Nokia.
Banu
But not nearly as exciting as it would be if Nokia would make a Series 60 phone that didn't have gnome-sized buttons or have them arranged in strange, unnatural ways.
Why can't Nokia make a decent Series 60 phone?! To boot, they're all ugly as sin.
I want Series 60, especially if it has a decent browser on it. But all the Series 60 phones are wonderful pieces of technology with garbage physical interfaces. It's so sad, considering how usable some of their lower-end models are.
Ironically, Nokia is the only phone manufacturer with a sane software interface.
How hard is it for the submitter/editor to catch this one? WebKit doesn't even appear in the press release...
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.
Availabiliy of WebKit + other core Apple technologies probably makes it easier for Nokia to build an iTunes Phone, yeah?
The future is in beta
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.
The G5 image is one used for Apple technology in general (hence the "Technology (Apple)" alternate text and title text), not just hardware.
Of course, for some reason, they might have to change this soon...
R.Mo
to have 2 major browser opensource with Firefox (and hopefully KHTML and WebCore will soon merge together, now that WebCore CVS is avalable for KDE developers)
Wondering why i am doing so strange posts? I am trying to get a "+5,Flamebait" or "-1,Insightful" rating.
I think they can't use that code directly. If they want quality they have to rewrite it using S60 libs instead of libc....
Does it support tiny little tabs across the top of the browser screen? Then it'll be the total "killer app" ;-P
Ocean is land, covered with water.
Better licensing? What kind of crack are you smoking? The license has not changed.
If you are going to make some sort of comment about licensing then maybe you should see if it applies first.
Dixi et salvavi animam meam
So you saying the KDE people are producing a lesser project because they rather sacrifice features, correct behavior, and speed for clean code? perhaps they should reevaluate their levels.
No no no.
The KDE people are producing a project which is not as absolutely maximal as it could be today in order to prevent maintainance problems later.
Or rather, APPLE is sacrificing potentially the future quality of their project to improve the quality of their project today.
Yeah maybe you sometimes need to put in an ugly fix to get it to work right. But you are not a large multinational software project with many contributors.
Apple can maybe get away with what they're doing because they do not rely to any degree on volunteers and so can do things like just throw a bunch of engineers at webkit someday in the future and say "refactor this to code standards, lackeys!". KDE does not have that luxury.
Is this the same version which they ported to GTK and used on their very cool 770 internet tablet?
"Fighting terrorists with millitary might is like killing a mosquitor on your Dad's forehead with a rifle."
The first thing that came to my mind was the new dashboard widgets in Tiger. Remember, Dashboard widgets are written in Javascript, CSS, XML, and HTML. Each Widget is actual a webcore instance if my understanding is correct (or it's one big web core window). Couldn't be that difficult to make it work on this browser. And if you have seen the number of widgets out there (I was just @ WWDC), it is pretty amazing. And a lot of them would be perfect for cell phones. Just something to chew on...
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a difficult battle. - Plato
i don't have a super plan and it just counts as minutes on my phone. free nights and weekends means free web browsing. that being said the browser in my phone is not so good.
i do have the USB cable to connect to my laptop and that counts as minutes even though it is on their data network (i don't actually dial into an ISP... it's faster than that). same deal, free nights and weekends on data use too.
Good article, showing that Apple's role as a leader of the open source movement is finally paying off. Apple's groundbreaking work on KHTML is to become the foundation of many of Nokia's future lines.
From the article (and there's even a linux quote for those of you who are into that kind of thing!):Looks like Apple and their open-source efforts have done it again!
Am I going senile here, or is this the same Nokia that gave a large handout to the Mozilla corporation?
This move just doesn't seem to make any sense whatsoever to me, as if you believe the rumours, they had some kind of gecko based browser already up and running. All I can assume is that it just didn't cut the mustard.
Anyone know any more about this?
Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
I seem to remember Dave Hyatt setting us straight on that one. The iTunes Music Store does not use WebCore or WebKit to render its pages.
Just why, I couldn't guess. It seems like a natural application for it.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
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.
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!
That's why I just switched to T-Mobile.
Their net service is FAR from perfect, but I can surf to my heart's delight for $5 a month.
You have to remember that many of the KDE developers are paid by Trolltech. And part of their job is to keep KDE locked into Qt
Trolltech uses KDE as a showcase, in order to sell proprietary Qt lock-in licenses. While KDE may use Qt under a GPL license, for proprietary software developers, allowing themselves to become locked in to proprietary Qt is the only way to create software that is fully integrated with the KDE desktop environment.
When Apple adopted KHTML for Safari, the first thing Apple did was to reorganize the KHTML code into logical layers, in order to separate out the Qt interface code. That way, Apple was able to replace the Qt interface layer with their own Aqua interface layer for OS/X.
Nokia then took Apple's layered KHTML code, known as Webcore, and created a GTK interface layer.
As any good software developer can tell you, that sort of code layering is useful, because of the flexibility it provides. If used throughout KDE, for example, it would allow KDE to be easily ported, beyond Qt, to multiple other GUI environments, such as GTK, Aqua, Windows, Mozilla's XUL, QNX's Photon, and so on. KDE could become the most open, most cross-platform, and most widely used desktop environment outside of Windows.
But, as I said, it wouldn't be in Trolltech's best interest, so it's probably not going to happen. I expect KDE will continue to be held back by Qt's licensing restrictions, which is a shame.
Ok so maybe you are not praying about it but it seems that Nokia has decided to change their ways. The 668* series Nokia phone is a step in the right direction.
Who is General Failure, and why is he reading my hard disk?
Wow... one wonders how you've remained unmodded down by the KDE zealots. Anyone pointing out the fatal flaws in that desktop and strategy are usually "-1, Don't want to listen" in seconds.
No matter how many times you tell them this, they still won't listen. They still continue to make ridiculous claims that KDE is technically superior, or has a better architecture than other desktops... all of which is complete fantasy. KDE is a dependency nightmare. It's poorly engineered, and most of its code is shockingly badly written. tha idiot m50d can be found on every KDE story (and most GNOME ones too) making ridiculous claims and idiotic statements about how KDE r00lz. It never occurs to him that thw work done on webkit made it *better* than KHTML -- not only at passing ACID tests, but from a pure software engineering standpoint.
Far from being a healthy project, KDE is totally dependent on TrollTech, it's health as a company and goodwill (don't bother mentioning the FreeQt agreements, they aren't worth the bandwidth used to email them). And these days, KDE is being badly left behind by GNOME.
Sure, that's nice and all. But in the mean time, Nokia only provides its software for MS Windows http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,,72014,00.html
:(
Simalarly, drivers for their connectivity cables are Windows only
Can't sync my current Nokia phone on my Powerbook. The same goes for the next Nokia model i was eyeing. In fact, for that very reason I haven't bought it yet. Sorry Nokia.
I think Nokia and Apple has enough money to purchase Qt licenses if it wants too. Qt licenses are not expensive.
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
i'm sure (s)he did read the "first fucking sentence". equally sure, you seem to be unable to understand how licensing works. and fair enough, it's a complex and tricky topic that legal professionals spend stupid amounts of time on. hm. maybe that's WHY it's complex and tricky; but anyways....
if webkit were to "kill off" khtml, which doesn't actually make any sense since they are all collaborating on this thing together, that wouldn't change khtml's license or webkit's license. no license change would happen for those using khtml, either in webkit or "straight from KDE's svn repository" versions. it's the LGPL either way. what matters is the rendering toolkit used beneath it, but that isn't a unique privilege of webkit over "vanilla" khtml.
Here is an email from Roland Geisler at Nokia that was posted on the Safari Web Kit mailing list (more info at http://webkit.opendarwin.org/contact.html)
From: roland geisler
Subject: [webkit-dev] Greetings from the Series 60 mobile browser team at Nokia
Date: June 13, 2005 2:52:33 PM PDT
RE: Recent press release: http://press.nokia.com/PR/200506/998214_5.html
Hi,
I'm heading marketing and strategy at Nokia for Series 60's new mobile browser that will be built upon WebCore/KHTML and JavaScriptCore/KJS. I am writing you this email to thank you for having built the Konqueror and Safari browser with the two components WebCore/KHTML and JavaScriptCore/KJS. I would like to introduce myself and some members from our core development team, and explain why we at Nokia have selected your code base for our future Series 60 mobile browser. I also hope that this will start a mutual dialogue among us that will support all of our projects in the future.
Not all of you might be familiar with Series 60. Series 60 is a smart phone software platform developed by Nokia, which enables feature rich applications on mobile devices. Series 60 is based on the Symbian OS and is written in C++. More information can be found from http://www.forum.nokia.com/
and http://www.series60.com/.
I copied some of our core development team members on this email so you have their names and contact information. Antti Koivisto, whom you might know already, is one of the co-authors of KHTML and has been working for Nokia Research Center for the past few years and recently joined our mobile browser development team in Boston. David Carson and Deepika Chauhan are two of the original developers of the Nokia mobile browser. Zalan Bujtas, Prabhakar Marnadi, Yongjun Zhang and Sachin Padma have been working with mobile browsers for some years at Nokia in Helsinki and Boston. Keith Hollis has several years experience working with mobile browsers and has recently joined our team in Boston, earlier he was the principal person leading the port of the Opera web browser to the Symbian OS at Opera Software. Guido Grassel, Kimmo Kinnunen and Andrei Popescu are working at our Nokia Research Center in Helsinki (http://www.nokia.com/research/) where we have built the GTK port of Apple's WebCore that we released last year - http://gtk-webcore.sourceforge.net/.
The high performance, low memory consumption and small code footprint of KHTML and KJS make these components ideal for resource-constrained mobile devices. Clean architecture and good design create a good base for future development of mobile features. In addition, Web compliance was another important criteria for us. Congratulations to the KDE Konqueror developer team for building such a great browser.
Big thanks at this point also go to the Apple Safari team that has tremendously improved KHTML and KJS in many areas, in particular in Web compliance and performance. WebCore and JavaScriptCore also offer a cleaner separation to the underlying operating system. For these reasons we at Nokia chose WebCore and JavaScriptCore as the code base for our Series 60 mobile browser.
Our plan is that the new Series 60 mobile browser will be available as a standard Series 60 application during the first half of 2006.
We at Nokia are excited to use WebCore/KHTML and JavaScriptCore/KJS for our future Series 60 mobile browser. I hope that we can start a dialogue with your community and the Apple Safari team on how to "mobilize" WebCore/KHTML and JavaScriptCore/KJS to create the best Web browser based on open-source components for mobile devices.
Best regards,
Roland Geisler
Head of Marketing & Strategy, Series 60 Browser
Nok
> Now do you see why hardly any KDE code gets
> re-used outside the KDE project
it's due at least in part to people such as yourself who go around playing the Anonymous Ignoramus spreading lies, half truths and other misinformation.
it'd be nice to discuss the real issues like grown ups so that things like the Qt license can be put into proper perspective, as opposed to the overly simplistic and vitriolic position you have taken here. but that would require an informed, mature, non-anonymous person on the other side of that discussion. when you find one willing to play that part let me know and we can find an appropriate venue.
which is exactly the opposite of what Nokia just said about KDE code in this article. good job!
You mean, in the PUBLIC RELATIONS release? Oh my... they said nice things in a P.R. article. Oh, and thanks for snipping that out of context: KDE is a dependency nightmare... ask Apple how many man-months it took them to sort out KHTML.
The rest of your message is well upto your usual standards: Vague nonsensical assertions about Red Hat's position with GNOME being the same as TrollTech and a, frankly, bizarre mention of Microsoft.
> in the PUBLIC RELATIONS release
not just there, but also in their project lead's email to kfm-devel.
> ask Apple how many man-months it took them to
> sort out KHTML
few enough that it was worth passing up every other option in front of them.
> your usual standards
oh, you're one of those people who follow me around, reading what i write only to get all pissy about it afterwards? now i'm doubly curious as to who the (wo)man behind the mask is.
> nonsensical assertions about Red Hat's position
> with GNOME being the same as TrollTech
analogous, which is what i was implying, isn't equivalent to "the same". i was offering a familiar frame of reference for comparison.
> and a, frankly, bizarre mention of Microsoft.
the mention of MS was to remind you who the competition on the desktop truly is, and who benefits from people such as yourself sowing baseless dissent.
apologies for showing you up in public.
what is untrue about your message is the assertion that there isn't a lot of code shared between KDE and other projects, including code that originated within KDE itself.
what is also untrue is that more widespread sharing of KDE code has a lot less to do with Qt licensing than it does with other issues, such as language preferences, integration issues, NIH, industry politics and us not having promoted the platform as much as we probably could have in the past.
that's what i meant by "simplistic". you try and paint it as a one dimensional issue, but it's not. often times, Qt licensing costs never really come into the play.
> You really are a moron, aren't you?
my, what fine social skills you have.
> BUT IT DEPENDED ON QT WHICH MADE THE WHOLE
> FUCKING THING GPL
screaming doesn't make you less wrong. the original assertion was that webcore "killing" khtml would result in a better licensing situation. and what i was pointing out was that it wouldn't. see, khtml is, was and likely always will be LGPL. popping webcore in there instead and using it against Qt results in the same licensing scenario. IOW, no change. it isn't the webcore/khtml code that is of interest in regards to licensing, it's the toolkit you compile it against.
if the original poster had said, "if KDE devs would stop linking KHTML to Qt then it would result in a cheaper licensing situation for closed source devel" i would've agreed. because, well, they would've been right. =)
...up to version 3.4.1, which is what I'm using to post this.
Since 3.4.2 includes lots of merges from WebKit, I'd expect the JS support to be startlingly better, but I'd also expect to see that a few bugs have crept in. 3.4.3 should be pretty much all shiny and good.
Then the KDE team will release KDE4, which will practically clean your teeth for you and think happy thoughts in addition to being a file-manager-over-SSH (fish://user@host), man-page reader (man:bash), CD ripper (audiocd:/)and practically everything else (mostly the kinds of features MSIE lies awake at night wishing for). Huge? yes; bloated? yes; complicated? well, only under the hood - but still remarkably quick and flexible.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
..."how can I get this working in the next minute and thirty?"
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
In case you havent noticed, Qt is dual licensed, it's not just GPL'd. So, anyone that wanted to could use the non GPL Qt license and KDE lgpl would be ok.
One project that does use KDE code, is Opie.
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."