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Technology (Apple) Businesses Technology Apple

Nokia Develops a New Browser on Apple WebKit 211

Posted by Hemos from the powering-small-devices-everywhere dept.
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"."
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Nokia Develops a New Browser on Apple WebKit More

Nokia Develops a New Browser on Apple WebKit

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  • Let me know when its free to use (Score:4, Insightful)

    by CrazyJim1 ( 809850 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @10:32AM (#12802976) Journal
    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.
    • Sorry, but I gotta side with CrazyJim here on this one. I never use the browser on any of my phones just because the data service charge is so high. I'm sure it makes sense for some people but deffinitly not for most. it's not the same as asking an isp for a reuter and not exspecting to pay for bandwidth because the primary reason for use of a phone is to make phone calls. I think a lot of people have lost site of this and confuse their phones for instant messaging, camera, web browsing toys and not a devic

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • 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.

  • I wonder... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by techathead ( 201626 )
    If apple was actually working with them on this, or if they just are using the recently released webkit code from apple.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @10:34AM (#12803000)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Wither KHTML? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by m50d ( 797211 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @10:46AM (#12803122) Homepage Journal
      WebKit doesn't meet KDE's coding standards. They're quite strict, in order to keep a clean codebase, wheras Apple has rushed features in to a certain extent. Also, KHTML is integrated into KDE, and a large part of the difference between it and WebKit is that Apple have done a lot of work to remove that integration (and add their own). I suspect the reason Nokia are using WebKit is it is mostly de-integrated. Porting to KDE would just mean adding all the integration back in. (kparts, kwallet, etc.). Not too much work, but pretty pointless because the result would be very similar to KHTML.

      • Re:Wither KHTML? (Score:2, Interesting)

        by jellomizer ( 103300 ) *
        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.

        I agree code should be clean when possible. But it is not always possible to produce clean code. Sometimes you need to put an ugly fix in it to get it to work right.

        • Re:Wither KHTML? (Score:2, Flamebait)

          by Gregg Alan ( 8487 ) *
          Has it occurred to you that Apple may not have chosen KHTML if it hadn't been clean code?

          Maybe instead of bashing KHTML you should bash Gecko (or whatever they call it, not sure) for not being quality enough code for Apple to want to use it.

          (as an aside, IME, KHTML is fast, has the features I use/need, and it's behavior is good for the sites I visit though I realize this may not apply to everyone.)
        • What features are they sacrificing? All the crap about not being able to merge the webkit changes into Konqueror are over....they already did it.
        • Sometimes you need to put an ugly fix in it to get it to work right.

          That is never true. Sometimes you might be tempted to add an ugly fix to alter some behavior to how you think it should be today, but that doesn't make it right or good.

          If the answer is "ad-hoc patch", then you're asking the wrong question.

    • > This way the three groups, Nokia, KDE, and
      > Apple, will be working on making one browser
      > engine perfect

      this would be purpose and point of http://khtml.info/ [khtml.info] =)

  • That's quite strange (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 13, 2005 @10:34AM (#12803002)
    I had thought WebKit had some nontrivial tyings into Cocoa. Is WebKit that neatly separable from Cocoa? Does it use qt internally still?
    • They probably mistyped and meant to say WebCore. That would be my guess.

    • Re:That's quite strange (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Elwood P Dowd ( 16933 ) <judgmentalist@gmail.com> on Monday June 13, 2005 @11:55AM (#12803756) Journal
      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?

  • There is a GTK+ Webcore based Web browser (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Which is based upon the Webcore released by NOKIA not long ago. Here is a Screenshot [img130.echo.cx]

    And further Information can be found here [akcaagac.com].
    • Gosh, so it's sort of the bastard offspring of KDE, GNOME, and Apple. How very odd. I wonder if this will mean GNOME will get a webkit based browser in the near future.

      I wonder how many people would have predicted that GNOME would gain the most from Apple taking up KHTML? Sure, we aren't there yet, but it begins to look possible. How very very odd.

      Jedidiah.

  • hmmmm. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Kaamoss ( 872616 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @10:35AM (#12803011) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:hmmmm. (Score:3, Informative)

      by CdBee ( 742846 )
      KDE - upon which WebKit is based - is LGPL, meaning full source-code disclosure isn't required

      • Re:hmmmm. (Score:5, Informative)

        by oever ( 233119 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @10:45AM (#12803109) Homepage
        It is required! The code for the _library_ must be provided. The code linking to it may stay undisclosed.

      • Re:hmmmm. (Score:5, Informative)

        by Coryoth ( 254751 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @11:00AM (#12803249) Homepage Journal
        Of course Nokia has apparently taken webkit and built the GUI for it using GTK+. The result is GTK-WebKit, which has indeed been open sourced - you can find it here [sourceforge.net]. I have no idea how much of their browser that contains, but at the least it is an HTML renderer and basic GUI, which should get you the better part of the browser whole.

        Does a GTK+/KHTML browser count as cross desktop cooperation, or a mutant bastard offspring created by third party mad scientists?

        Jedidiah.
        • Seems a bit silly to me considering the mature Qt/Embedded exists, while afaik there's nothing like that for GTK, and certainly not at the same level of maturity.
          • Well, they were probably already working on Maemo / Nokia 770 back then, and did it primarily for it.

            "Silly"? I really, really doubt Nokia just spinned a dice that decided to take one, and then build not just one product but entire platform on top of that. In addition to the whole GPL/LGPL/Commercial mess, they probably wanted flexibility, and then again, why not? The ARM monsters mobiles tend to have these days should be more than capable of running X.
    • True, but at least partial disclosure is right? I'm not an expert on liscenses so let me know if I'm mistaken. I would think that they would need to give back to the community in some way...

      • Re:hmmmm. (Score:2, Informative)

        by XbainX ( 464073 )
        The LGPL requires any distributed modifications of LGPL'd source code must be made available.

        Nokia using a LGPL'd web library for their browser does not mean they have to release the source code for the browser.

  • Hmm (Score:3, Informative)

    by Payalnik ( 852279 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @10:35AM (#12803015) Homepage
    I do suppose Opera has more experience in fitting web pages to small screens. Have they made it better?

    • Re:Hmm (Score:2, Interesting)

      by SpyPlane ( 733043 )
      Opera is available on the competitor's phone (Qualcomm) on the Brew platform. So, I don't suppose Nokia made it better, they just didn't have Opera available to them.

  • How long... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Fermatprime ( 883412 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @10:37AM (#12803033)
    How long until Cringely announces the details of the upcoming Apple/Intel/Nokia merger?

  • Return the favor? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DeepFried ( 644194 ) * on Monday June 13, 2005 @10:37AM (#12803036) Homepage
    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.
    • Maybe they can return the favor by being more Mac friendly in their desktop and sync software rollouts

      They're notorious for this - my series-40 phone is in the same boat. No iSync support and no sign of it coming, either. I'd high hopes for decent series-40 support being added to Tiger but ... nope! AFAIK, series-60 is there now ...

      In the meantime, may I recommend BluePhoneElite [reelintelligence.com]?

  • Minimo (Score:5, Interesting)

    by brolewis ( 712511 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @10:37AM (#12803038)
    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?

  • Opera (Score:3, Informative)

    by Eric Giguere ( 42863 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @10:39AM (#12803059) Homepage Journal

    This is a blow for the Opera for Mobile [opera.com] 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 [reqwireless.com] or even the BlackBerry's built-in browser?

    Eric
    J2ME acronyms defined [ericgiguere.com]
    • The problem is, ReqWireless WebViewer (and TLogic PocketWeb) is in a whole different class from Opera for Mobile, MiniMo, and this.

      The first two run on J2ME, whereas the others are native S60 apps (note: Opera is available in a BREW version. Does that count, though? I mean, you have to have a BREW phone...)
      • Yes, I know the Reqwireless browser is J2ME (I know the guys who built it) but it seems to me that you still need proxying to reduce the wireless network traffic so that pages don't load so quickly by stripping and transforming (and compressing) the pages that get sent back down...
        • Well, Opera CAN be run in such a mode [opera.com].

          However, the reason they do this has little to do with network access (except on Opera) - they've hit dial-up speeds (and beyond), after all. It has to do with the fact that the J2ME devices have limited RAM, and can't hold a large page.

          • It has to do with the fact that the J2ME devices have limited RAM, and can't hold a large page.

            Luckily, the memory limitations that once seriously constrained J2ME platforms [ericgiguere.com] are becoming a thing of the past with the newer devices, though it's still not an excuse to go and download megabytes of data. I still find it really slow, in Canada at least, to surf the web via cellphone/BlackBerry. Reminds me of WAP browsing, and we all know how people loved that.

            Eric
            Read my Google AdSense Tips [ericgiguere.com]

  • It's very spiffy (Score:4, Informative)

    by Kyro ( 302315 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @10:44AM (#12803103)
    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 [sourceforge.net] and there's lots of other interesting tidbits of information on that site.
    • This has been out for a while

      Well, not really. While they've probably collaborated with their gtk-webcore project to a large extent, Symbian doesn't have gtk+, so it's not quite the same and this is yet another and new port.

  • Gtk+ WebCore (Score:5, Informative)

    by mukund ( 163654 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @10:44AM (#12803104) Homepage

    Gtk+ WebCore [sourceforge.net] seems to be made at Nokia.

  • That's exciting (Score:3, Insightful)

    by J. T. MacLeod ( 111094 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @10:44AM (#12803105)
    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.
    • You think that's bad: take a look at the Series 80 'phones'. My 9500 is ugly with a capital Ug.

    • Re:That's exciting (Score:3, Insightful)

      by SpamJunkie ( 557825 )
      Ironically, Nokia is the only phone manufacturer with a sane software interface.

      I thought this too until I started to do some serious research. My aging nokia needed to be replaced and the new nokias turned me off for the same reason: horribly deformed keypads and general ugliness. Even though I was afraid of giving up the familiar interface I checked out some alternatives.

      To my surprise Sony Ericsson has really usable phones. I had discounted them because their phones lack dedicated answer/hang up ke
    • 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 [russellbeattie.com] is a step in the right direction.
    • Did you know Nokia license Series 60 to other manufacturers? Info is at http://www.series60.com/products [series60.com]

      The Sendo is a lovely device - I have a small issue with it, otherwise I'd be using it right now - and the Panasonics look quite good too.

  • Wrong...WebCore, not WebKit (Score:5, Informative)

    by xeno314 ( 661565 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @10:46AM (#12803120)
    How hard is it for the submitter/editor to catch this one? WebKit doesn't even appear in the press release...

  • Good (Score:4, Interesting)

    by pherthyl ( 445706 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @10:49AM (#12803151)
    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.

  • Tabs? (Score:3, Funny)

    by tivoKlr ( 659818 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @11:19AM (#12803431) Journal
    Does it support tiny little tabs across the top of the browser screen? Then it'll be the total "killer app" ;-P
  • Is this the same version which they ported to GTK and used on their very cool 770 internet tablet?

  • Think Widgets (Score:2, Insightful)

    by 605dave ( 722736 )
    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...
    • In fact, leveraging WebCore is the strategy used by Amnesty [mesadynamics.com] for running Dashboard widgets on the desktop under Panther (10.3.9) and Tiger.

      But doing the same on a cell phone OS is problematic because many widgets use BSD system calls, embedded AppleScripts and Cocoa plugins to do their work.

      So, CSS, JavaScript and HTML support is only adequate to support the very simplest of widgets.

  • But why? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Gilesx ( 525831 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @12:23PM (#12804010)
    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?

    • Re:But why? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Iloinen Lohikrme ( 880747 )
      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 p
  • 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

  • Animated .GIF bug? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Jay Maynard ( 54798 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @12:43PM (#12804240) Homepage
    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.
    • Who the hell wants animated Gif's anyway? I'd Call that a feature.
      • Who the hell wants animated Gif's anyway? I'd Call that a feature.

        That entirely depends. NASA also has some quite nice animated gif's.

        A real feature would be to automatically logon to the remote server and crashing it every time it serves a PopUnder :-)

  • Nokia Email on WebKit mailing list (Score:3, Informative)

    by cuijian ( 110696 ) * on Monday June 13, 2005 @06:26PM (#12807708)
    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 [opendarwin.org])

    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 [nokia.com]

    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/ [nokia.com]
    and http://www.series60.com/ [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/ [nokia.com]) where we have built the GTK port of Apple's WebCore that we released last year - http://gtk-webcore.sourceforge.net/ [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

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