The Future of WebKit • Mobile and More Cross Platform Apps?

Apple, CSS, Google, New Category, Software, Tech News

Webkit, the core rendering engine behind Apple’s Safari web browser (and iTunes, Safari mobile and many more web-ready apps), recently went open source with the Webkit project.This is great news as community contribution to the project can only mean significant enhancements that will find their way into Apple’s applications.

I was certainly luke warm on Safari 2, but saw promise for Safari 3 in Leopard. With Safari 3 it certainly renders fast. Almost 3x faster on both Mac and Windows and adheres far better to W3C CSS standards. It is near fully compliant with CSS 2.1 and adds significant CSS Level 3 capabilities as noted here.

The big news to go along with this: Google announced that Android’s web browser will employ the Webkit engine. That means Google will surely release all their enhancements to the Open Source project shortly. Apple will incorporate the Google goodies in Safari sometime down the line. Which also implies that Mobile Safari on iPhone will share some features with the Andriod web browser. Great synergy between the two companies on this effort if it goes down this way. All based on assumptions but good news all around.

To read more about webkits new features and how it can makr a web developers life easier check out this article over at ArsTechnica.

dmihalovic @ November 17, 2007