Items tagged with WebKit
WebKit has become something of a common engine powering a lot of browsers these days, but one could argue that Android is also powering a lot of devices these days, despite the fact that things like the Kindle Fire look nothing like Android. So today, Google's announcing a fork of its own. As platforms evolve and mature, we're seeing a trend -- the initial platform hits, and eventually, various parties find different ways to exploit it. Eventually, you end up with different end products with some of the same underlying technologies powering things. With Chrome, WebKit has been powering things on the render side. But now, Blink is being introduced to take things from here. Chromium uses a different...
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In the Web browser world, WebKit is a force to be reckoned with. It began life as a couple of KDE libraries (KHTML and KJS), but was then forked and further developed by a bevvy of companies including Apple, Nokia, Google and RIM. While KHTML's initial focus was to support the popular Linux Web browser Konquerer, the fork, which then became known as WebKit, was cross-platform - Mac, Linux, Windows and even mobile. Suffice to say, WebKit has proven to be one of the most successful software forks ever created. Today, WebKit is used by a great number of browsers, with Google Chrome and Apple Safari leading the pack. Other browsers backed by the Web engine include those bundled with BlackBerry devices,...
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Particularly on iOS, where they have seen themselves frozen out of the App Store at times (Google Voice comes to mind), Google has pushed the idea of web apps. They can be modified without an app store or market, and the results made public with a flick of a switch. On Wednesday, a switch was flicked with regards to the mobile YouTube site (https://m.youtube.com/) and a new mobile YouTube site hit the Internet. As you can expect, the new site is HTML5, and thus can be viewed on an iOS device, as well as on browsers on newer platforms such as Android. YouTube product manager Andrey Doronichev during a briefing Wednesday morning at YouTube's headquarters, emphasized that the idea was to bring the...
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A few weeks after Apple announced its revised programming rules for iPhad devices, Adobe dropped the bombshell that it was abandoning Apple's platform. Up until late April, Adobe had tirelessly pledged Flash support for the iPhone, but certain changes to the developer license made it too risky for the company to continue development. Apple and Adobe have publicly sparred in the last week and the Flash developer may have deliberately upped the ante. Sources at the FTC revealed today that the regulatory agency is preparing to investigate Apple's developer license to see if it unfairly restricts competition—purportedly at Adobe's request. The troublesome section of Apple's developer license is 3.3.1,...
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RIM's BlackBerry line of smartphones has been popular among business users for years, but if there's one complaint many users have it's that the Web browser is lagging in functionality in comparison to the full-fledged browsers available on other smartphones such as the iPhone. Now, we're beginning to see hope that a new browser for the BlackBerry platform will be coming soon. Ever since RIM purchased Torch Mobile in August of 2009, many people suspected that a WebKit-powered BlackBerry browser was in the works. Although RIM hasn't specified when the new browser will be available, it is showing off its new, faster, and smoother WebKit-powered browser at Mobile World Congress this week. Co-CEO...
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On Thursday Webkit, the open source browser engine that is notably used in both Safari and Chrome, announced that it is the first browser engine to fully pass the Web Standards Project (WaSP) Acid3 test. In late March Webkit announced it had achieved "most" of the Acid3 test, with the only missing issue the fact that part of the Acid3 test is that the animation during the test must be "smooth." That same month, another engine, Presto, achieved the 100/100 rendering below, but it still has not achieved "smooth" animation. As you can see in the results dialog which you receive by clicking on the “A” in Acid3, there is confirmation that Webkit indeed passed the smooth animation condition on a 2.4GHz...
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