Apparently Steve Ballmer has publicly stated that Microsoft plans to look into Webkit... that's news to me! Microsoft's browser needs to support modern web standards: HTML4, XHTML, CSS, SVG and as much HTML5 as is ready for deployment.
But Microsoft has also publicly been "looking into" SVG for years and years, so I'm not going to hold my breath.
These days, Internet Explorer is the last browser I look at... as long as all my textual content is actually visible, then that's just fine by me.
Google is going to release a new open-source web browser tomorrow (Sept 2nd, 2008) called Google Chrome. Lots of information contained in forty pages of this comic book. The rendering engine is WebKit, but it has its own JavaScript engine (V8) that compiles the JS into bytemachine code and uses more efficient garbage collection. It also follows the thoughts of the Internet Explorer team of putting the tab at the root of the UI and letting each tab be its own process (not just thread). Oh, it comes with Google Gears pre-installed too.
This all sounds good: security, stability, anti-phishing, sandboxing, 'superfast' JS. Of course there's only one true test though.
At first I was wondering if this was a fork of WebKit, but I think the only thing that would make sense would be for Google to work in parallel with WebKit (continually updating Chrome's rendering engine with new versions of WebKit). Everything else would be part of the Chrome open source project. If you're in the know, drop a line below.
Ok, I'm happy. A completely open source browser that supports SVG and is (sort of) co-sponsored by two big companies with lots of cash (Google and Apple).
I've made enough updates over the past week or so on my SVG Web Stats thing to call it 2.0. Here are a list of changes: Read the rest of this entry ...
Very cool stuff from roc. An interesting alternative to all the CSS properties being added to WebKit. Meanwhile, Microsoft is still plodding away on bog-standard CSS 2 - expect an update from them in August, if you're still interested (if you are maybe you want to try a new plugin for IE?)
The last two years have been explosive for WebKit development - the project has really accelerated, moving at a much faster perceivable rate than the other notable open-source web platform, Mozilla. I've been noticing more and more innovations that affect web developers from the Safari blog. Read the rest of this entry ...
