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Apple Opens WebKit

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Original poster
Apr 12, 2001
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Apple has opened up its Webkit software as an Open Source Project.

The software and documentation can be found at http://webkit.opendarwin.org/

Webkit is at the rendering core of Apple's web browser, Safari. The most recent builds have provided performance enhancements as well as compatibility (Acid 2 test). By providing the source, it allows developers to contribute to Webkit's progress. End users can build the latest version and use it with the current version of Safari to utilize the latest improvements in the web rendering engine.

David Hyatt discusses it in his blog.

The latest version of webkit is reportedly "substantially faster at loading Web pages and at handling JavaScript. It contains a number of additional performance improvements that went in post-Tiger."
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2005/06/07/apple-opens-webkit/
Great!

New builds any time we want?

Sounds like fun, although I think I'll wait for 10.4.2 myself :)
 
Open Source is always good news. Once everybody gets to start working on it we'll hopefully see a lot quicker development and improvements.
 
broken_keyboard said:
So... presumably someone could use this engine to make a Windows or Linux browser.
Click to expand...
Well, the safari rendering engine is based on khtml, which is in KDE already. So, I believe that means a Linux browser should be really easy to implement. Does anyone know what language the webkit is written in? Objective C?

Edit:
"WebKit, the Objective-C API that wraps WebCore..."
Maybe I should've read the Surfin' Safari webpage first... so I guess the question to ask is, what language is WebCore written in? :p
 
Excellent news

This is good for Apple to create a supportive atmosphere for open source. There are excellent open source technologies out there and Apple seems to support them well. Though I would have supported Apple's position regarding Safari development, it's good to see them listen to the community and respond to their concerns even though they don't have too.
 
Sweet, I will try compiling my own version of the webkit framework tomorrow. Speed increases are always good.
 
I don't care about it being open source for my own development uses, but I think this is awesome because it enables me to get the latest builds, and more importantly because it is certain to appease the open source community who was up in arms a couple of weeks ago.




P.S. My first news submission and it gets accepted :)
 
It would be nice to be able to use it with one of my favorite tiny apps: Web Minimalist by Emlyn Murphy, to make it trivial to test changes to the kit without even needing a web browser or disk files.
 
iMeowbot said:
There are build and run instructions on the Darwin Web site. They aren't offering pre-built snapshots right now, as far as I can tell.
Click to expand...

It says on the site that they plan to offer nightly binaries in the future.

At this time downloadable binaries of WebKit are not available, although we are looking into hosting such nightly binaries in the future
Click to expand...

I will have a go at building tomorrow!
 
altivec 2003 said:
That certainly may be true, but I have no hope for any visible improvement; I have dialup :mad:.
Click to expand...
There have been some tweaks to Javascript, so you might benefit anyway.
 
I checked out the code, but when I attempt to build it says "BUILD FAILED."

I followed the checking out and building information on the site, twice.

What would cause a build to fail like this? Thanks. I really want to run Safari under this.
 
Is this related to that thing I read about the open source community saying Apple hadn't given much back regarding Safari? Or something like that anyway.
 
It's great that they've really open-sourced Safari. I hope this satisfies the KDE people and it helps them to make Konqueror (sp?) better. If only I could get the build to work though... (I'm getting this error when with run-safari: Can't find executable at /Users/chase/Safari/Deployment/JavaScriptCore.framework/Versions/A/JavaScriptCore; have you built successfully?)
-Chase
 
rendezvouscp said:
It's great that they've really open-sourced Safari. I hope this satisfies the KDE people and it helps them to make Konqueror (sp?) better. If only I could get the build to work though... (I'm getting this error when with run-safari: Can't find executable at /Users/chase/Safari/Deployment/JavaScriptCore.framework/Versions/A/JavaScriptCore; have you built successfully?)
-Chase
Click to expand...

are you running panther? I tried to build it and got two errors. I checked some page, i think linked through opendarwin, and it says it wont build on anything but tiger. They want to make the webcore more adaptable to different os's/frameworks, so they will have to fix this. I think there is already a port that nokia did to work with GTK* or whatever it's called, and they want to pull the changes into the main source trunk.
 
dstorey said:
are you running panther? I tried to build it and got two errors. I checked some page, i think linked through opendarwin, and it says it wont build on anything but tiger. They want to make the webcore more adaptable to different os's/frameworks, so they will have to fix this. I think there is already a port that nokia did to work with GTK* or whatever it's called, and they want to pull the changes into the main source trunk.
Click to expand...

Nope, 10.4.1. It's not the first screwy thing in Tiger, so I'll live without it until someone makes nightly builds.
-Chase
 
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