satine.org

by Charles Ying

WebKit, the New Linux

September 2nd, 2008

What do Apple, Google, Adobe, Nokia and RIM have in common?

WebKit.

WebKit is in iPhones, Android phones, Google Chrome, Mac OS X, Nokia S60, Blackberries, 2009 Palm Phones, and Adobe AIR. For every tech gadget that the blogosphere drools over, WebKit is there.

And more hotness is coming.

These companies are fierce mobile sector competitors. Yet they all use WebKit. Linux is the only thing that even comes close to such widespread adoption in this sector.

That’s a big deal.

Now take a look at the members of the Android Open Handset Alliance. These companies are a who’s who in the mobile sector. KDDI. DoCoMo. Samsung. Motorola. Qualcomm.

That’s a huge deal.

Why? WebKit is smallest, fastest, simplest, and it’s an easily hackable browser kernel.

(Does that mean WebKit is the iPhone killer? (Wait a sec…))

And Google is about to contribute stuff to make it even faster. Gotta love that open source.

As for WebKit’s competitors?

Definitely Opera for now. Opera is a mobile juggernaut.

Perhaps Mozilla, once they have a browser core that’s small and simple enough.

I still have hope. The Mobile Web Wars would be pretty boring otherwise. ;-)

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9 Responses to “WebKit, the New Linux”

  1. WebKit, the New Linux Says:

    […] Random Feed wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptWhat do Apple, Google, Adobe, Nokia and RIM have in common? WebKit. WebKit is in iPhones, Android phones, Google Chrome, Mac OS X, Nokia S60, Blackberries, and Adobe AIR. For every tech gadget that the blogosphere drools over, WebKit is there. And more hotness is coming. These companies are fierce mobile sector competitors. Yet they all use WebKit. Linux is the only thing that even comes close to such widespread adoption in this sector. That’s a big deal. Now take a look at the members of […]

  2. vali Says:

    hello, you forgot Konqueror, which at this point has a larger market share than at least Google Chrome :)

  3. Stephan Sokolow Says:

    @vali:

    Saying “You forgot Konqueror” when talking about WebKit is like saying “You forgot Mozilla Suite” when talking about Gecko. Konqueror uses the KHTML rendering engine and since WebKit evolved from KHTML and has more developer support, the Konqueror developers are in the process of migrating from KHTML to WebKit… though I think they plan to keep a KHTML API wrapper in order to not break the API frozen in KDE 4.0.

  4. inside looking out » Blog Archive » Nokia Finally Answers the iPhone Says:

    […] Browser – It’s WebKit and Nokia already has a decent […]

  5. Bookmarks about Docomo Says:

    […] – bookmarked by 1 members originally found by thefurnace on 2008-11-12 WebKit, the New Linux http://www.satine.org/archives/2008/09/02/webkit-is-the-new-linux/ – bookmarked by 6 members […]

  6. satine.org » Palm Web OS Runs WebKit Says:

    […] Time to add Palm to my list of all the places you can find WebKit. […]

  7. satine.org » A Kick Ass Browser Renaissance Says:

    […] folks easily create and extend browsers with its very flexible and understandable code base. It’s truly the Linux renaissance again, driving innovation, and place browsers where they were difficult or impossible to put […]

  8. Mskullcap Says:

    Blackberry? No, not yet. Their browsers are in-house monstrosities (the embedable browser is even a different browser than the standalone!). They recently acquired a webkit implementation that runs on Blackberry, but my guess is it will take 6mos-1yr before we actually see it on a phone.

  9. cartier watches Says:

    cartier watches No, not yet. Their browsers are in-house monstrosities (the embedable browser is even a different browser than the standalone!). They recently acquired a webkit implementation that runs on Blackberry, but my guess is it will take 6mos-1yr before we actually see it on a phone.