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Nokia Opens the S60 Browser Source Code
segphault writes "Nokia has released the source code of it's S60 WebKit browser for mobile devices. Based on the HTML rendering components used in Konqueror and Safari, the S60 WebKit has a multitude of advanced features designed specifically for web navigation on devices with small screens. Nokia decided to release the source code under the permissive BSD license in order to promote adoption by other mobile device companies. From the article: 'the power and scalability of WebKit-based browsers and the highly permissive license under which the S60 WebKit source code is available make it a good choice for companies that want to add mobile web browsing to their devices. I think it will be particularly interesting to see how this affects Opera, whose revenue primarily comes from distribution of its own virtually ubiquitous embedded browser.'"
Hmm. I could be wrong about this, but are they not leagally bound to relase the source to their browser? It looks like it is based on Konqueror, which I believe has a GNU license. Why are they even allowed to release it under a freebsd license?
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We never said phone.
Since Apple already likes khtml... this could be a perfict fit for the fabled Apple iPhone... think iPod + phone done Apple style... get some high speed internet, like that EV-DO (or whatever its called - brain fart) and this could be a sweet little handset.
why wouldn't they?
As the Nokia s60 became effectivly closed platform with introduction of Symbian Signed and Developer Cerifications in Symbian 9.1 this is open sourcing of the browser mostly irrelevant. And so called "self-signing" for less essential capabilities still require developer certificate to test/debug application on the real phone.
If they wanted to hedge their bets, they could begin developing a S60 based web browser.
Opera got its start as a phone company spin off. It's still a reasonably small company, and might be nimble enough to navigate the changes from open source software and adapt their business model accordingly.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
The built in browser on my Nokia seems rather poor. It's way better than what samsung build in, but it falls a long way short of Opera IMHO.
The quality of the built in browser isn't exactly a deal-breaker for most phone consumers, so it's probably not worth the money that Nokia invests in it. By opening it, they will get more development for their money and possibly a browser to rival opera.
We're really starting to see the versatility of KHTML show. Besides being a very solid web browser in the form of Konqueror, it has also been adapted by Apple for Safari, and by Nokia.
It will be very interesting to see what happens when KDE 4.0 is released. KDE 4.0 should theoretically include support for Windows, due to the availability of a free Windows port of Qt and an emphasis on portability during the development of 4.0. We might even see Konqueror rival Firefox and Opera as the main competitor to Internet Explorer.
If KDE 4.0 is done correctly, we could very well see Konqueror itself running on various mobile and portable devices.
The difference between its, it's and such is taught from first grade to the 12th; is it not unreasonable, then, to expect such nerds of such intelligence that, undoubtably, fill the roles of the editorships of
Ninjas and pirates. How piquant.
I'm hoping and praying that someone knowledgable enough to port layout code tries getting WebKit ported to Win32. Right now the KHTML/KJS code runs on Cocoa (Apple's WebKit), QT (native) and GTK (Nokia's port), and I'm personally ready for a lighter alternative to Firefox.
Yes, Firefox is heavy for slower machines, and even on my A64 it's annoyingly laggy when many tabs are opened simultaneously - perhaps this could be remedied by the currently-open-tab's rendering/input threads getting high priority and the background tabs low priority, but it's been an issue with Firefox for too long (for me anyway, along with losing keystrokes during said lags - it's infuriating!).
Yes there's a khtml-win32 project on sourceforge, but it's long-dead and nothing else looks very promising. K-Meleon (a light-weight Win32-native Gecko-based browser) has recently seen some CCF builds which do away with XUL, leaving a MUCH snappier (and smaller!) browser, but it's unfortunately less functional for the time being.
Oh well, after all that ranting, they're all still much better than IE.
What I'd really love to see is a port to Palm OS or Windows Mobile, so I could use it on a Treo. Does anyone have the background in mobile platforms to say how feasible such a thing would be (especially the PalmOS, with it's antiquated and hacked/extended design).
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
The open source Nokia browser could mean trouble admits Opera's marketing manager in a comment in this article.
The future is in beta
he isn't talking about the WebKit based browser (look in other parts of the thread)
Haha you made me go there
Well, I'm going through the code base and some of the things which I recognize as being class Symbian things can be interesting to rag on ....
If you look at KWQString.h and KWQString.cpp, code just gets duplicated for who knows what reasons.... for example, just search on __OOM__
You'll find lots of places where OOM (Out Of Memory) handling is handled for two separate cases. Now, from what I can tell, at least in the circumstance of KWQStringData::initialize(), memory is allocated for the buffer within the string class. The original code does not check _unicode to see if it has been allocated, it just copies the source to the _unicode variable using memcpy. In a virtual memory system such as Linux or OS X, this is not an issue since the OS will always find a way to return memory... or the whole system will be crashing soon anyway.
On the OOM instance, there is one circumstance where if _maxUnicode > 0x1000 memory checking is performed... but in the alternative circumstance, it is not performed and is left without memory checking again.
This of course isn't the real issue... the real issue is that by making a special case for __OOM__ it obfuscated the code enough that it no longer was logical. The correct solution to take would have been to define the same macros for non-OOM systems and had a single instance of the code.
Symbian... especially Series 60 development classically has been known as an #ifdef hell. Symbian developers add #ifdefs everywhere even if they're not necessary. In this case, Nokia had the opportunity to actually fix out of memory or constrained memory handling for all platforms but instead chose to write code that was specific to themselves and simply label it something else.
Mind you, I'm only criticizing the very first file I looked at... I'm sure I can find far more interesting examples throughout the code base... but what interests me most about this initialize() example is that it depends on the Symbian throw mechanism... it doesn't actually fix out of memory situations or even attempt to deal with them... it only recognizes them.
AFAIK KHTML is licensed under the LGPL. If the S60 Webkit is based on it, shouldn't Nokia then propagate the limiting terms of that license?
Now, let's hope that someone in the Nokia Maemo community will handle this source and port it to the Nokia 770 platform. Would be ironic !
...).
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A browser was the main free and open source component lacking on Nokia 770.
If good enough, it could definitively take place of Opera, so the price of N770 could be cutted down a little bit, ironicaly, improving this Nokia product.
Anyway, for anybody: porting an app from Symbian platform to something like Qt/pe or Gnome over POSIX or win32 platform is a rather hard and long job. The open sourcing of this browser won't have any impact until it's made portable.
Until then Opera is alone on the race (given that Opera developers do the port themself, and that most of this work is already done: Opera works flawlessly on Win32, Symbian, Linux, *BSD, Mac OS X, Palm OS, Solaris, QNX, OS/2, Blackberry
Just a dream: let's hope that - before Nokia browser become portable and ubiquitous on embedded market - Opera will counter attack by open sourcing his product
As other pointed out, it's likely you are not using the browser discussed here. It is available only on the S60 3rd edition, it is based on KHTML and it is a real breakthough in the mobile area.
It's much faster and better than what comes with the phone - you should really check out Opera Mini 2.0!
Latest build of Opera for S60 passes the Acid2 test and it does support AJAX, so Opera Software certainly won't let be beaten easily.
I think it will be particularly interesting to see how this affects Opera, whose revenue primarily comes from distribution of its own virtually ubiquitous embedded browser.
Thing is, the average consumer (talking about the more average joe majority type rather than the techno savvy slashdotter) doesn't know one browser from another. ESPECIALLY when it comes to their mobile devices. Should something cause them to begin to actually learn what differentiates one browser from another, they will likely hear it with something like that statement above. Specifically directly mentioning that Opera is more or less the industry leader in the mobile browsers. In other words, they might actually learn that Opera exists. As they say, no publicity is bad publicity.
Right now the biggest hurdle Opera has is a lack of users who even know that it's as good as the other browsers if not better (officially I'm talking about the mobiles there where none of the other browsers are nearly so well developed, but, unofficially I really feel the same way about the desktop version.) The average joe, who makes up the majority, just knows that it can connect to "that interweb thingy," show them their e-mail, send a few text messages the likes of which would make an english professor break down and cry (like the infamous "where u at,") and maybe even play the occasional pointless Java or Flash based game. If they start hearing about how "this new Nokia browser has all these free plugins unlike that Opera browser that almost all the others use" then they've just picked up two facts -- one, it took this long for another browser to compete well enough for them to hear about it, and two, this Opera thingy was so popular up until now that it's on most of the phones.
That's just my opinion anyway. Only time will tell as they say.
On E60 it's a very pleasant experience, beats Opera on my old N90 hands down.
Submitted this story 48 hours before this one was submitted but mine didnt make it up. I guess they just dont like me.
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