Tag Archive for 'webkit'

Torch Mobile brings WebKit to Windows Mobile

Published by Stuart Houghton on February 12, 2008 in Applications and Mobile internet. 0 Comments

iris-flower.gifLast month we had news of a new browser from Wake3 that promised to bring the WebKit HTML rendering engine - as seen in Apple’s Safari - to Windows Mobile.

It looks as though Torch Mobile has beaten them to it. Their new browser - Iris - was announced yesterday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and it looks very promising indeed.

Iris features an implementation of WebKit that offers tabbed browsing, a tweakable interface and multiple zoom modes. Torch say that the browser also comes with integrated anti-phishing and pop-up blocking features as well as support for both key navigation and touch screens.

WebKit itself is one of the most standards-compliant HTML engines around, meaning Iris should be able to give a ‘desktop’ feel to rendered pages without too much effort.

There is no word on pricing as yet (Torch seem to be aiming to get Iris bundled with a few handsets) but a preview version for Windows Mobile 6 is available here.



Safari (sort of) coming to Windows Mobile

Published by Stuart Houghton on January 15, 2008 in Applications and Mobile internet. 0 Comments

Well, not Safari as such, but WebKit - the rendering engine that powers Apple’s browser - has been ported to Windows Mobile by Californian developers Wake3.

A rendering engine interprets  webpages and displays them to the screen. WebKit  is a fast, lightweight engine that powers Mobile and Desktop Safari as well as the Konqueror browser found on many Linux systems.

The basic WebKit is a solid, fast & standards-compliant HTML wrangler, but sadly lacks the tap-to-zoom and smooth scrolling extensions that Apple added to Safari.  As you can see from the video below the current alpha version makes heavy use of scroll bars to get around a big page.

Still, its early days yet and it would seem a shame to just slap a clunky interface on qualilty code like WebKit, so fingers crossed that Wake3 are working towards something special.