Webkit N800 browser
 

Hi,

I've been searching the internet for the WebKit browser that is being developed for the N800.

See here for details:
http://www.sand-labs.org/owb/wiki/OwbN800

But I cannot find a compiled version anywhere, anybody knows what to do to get this to work (without to all kinds of terminal commands) ?

Would be nice, I personally expect a great perfomance boost when using webkit instead of the mozilla engine now provided, what's your take on this ?

Re: Webkit N800 browser
 

As far as we know, it's dead.

I believe there is a Webkit component being worked on at Nokia slowly. No, I don't think you'd see much of a performance boost, if any.

Re: Webkit N800 browser
 

I have compiled and run it. It is not usable, since the interface is incomplete and it is very unstable.

Re: Webkit N800 browser
 

What about this project?

Posting cached site, since the git repo right now is "forbidden"...

Re: Webkit N800 browser
 

It seems that it is definitely not dead but the GIT repo has gone offline since this blogger published they were releasing the code.


http://blog.gwright.org.uk/articles/...al-goes-public

Re: Webkit N800 browser
 

Naah, if you look at the Google cache - the last commit was only 29 hours ago. :)

Re: Webkit N800 browser
 

The sand-labs OWB browser looks very much alive judging by the activity being recorded in this page - to their credit they're being more transparent and open than the other WebKit for Maemo development effort.

I'm not sure we need two independent WebKit browsers though, and the forked nature of the OWB browser is the wrong path to take in my mind.

Re: Webkit N800 browser
 

I think webkit perfomance will be better than gecko, since webkit is less of a memory hog. It's being used on a lot more low power cpu devices.

Re: Webkit N800 browser
 

It was my impression that Nokia was focusing their WebKit efforts on the web browser for their Symbian phones. I don't remember them saying they would be switching from the Mozilla engine on Maemo (especially after having finally moved away from Opera).

Re: Webkit N800 browser
 

Question being why don't the get the two teams collaborating and focus on the maemo webkit project instead of the gecko being that 100 million s60 phones use that already?

Re: Webkit N800 browser
 

Nice find - while it is not the Webkit engine to the integrated browser, it is yet another Webkit derivate browser which I wasn't aware of, and it has already progressed to the point that there is source code.

Re: Webkit N800 browser
 

I think Nokia are pretty browser agnostic, hence the browser abstraction layer that is the EAL. Longer term we may have the choice of WebKit and MicroB, and possibly some third party derivatives - they're just browser engines to perform the rendering, with the EAL providing the maemo UI.

Re: Webkit N800 browser
 

Yes, the webkit-eal is just a browser engine (eal = engine abstraction layer), and owb is a whole browser. However, while i don't get my hopes high for OWB, the other team is working also on the webkit integration for epiphany (which we will see official in Gnome 2.22), so i rather bet on them :)

Re: Webkit N800 browser
 

Is a later future version of the Gecko engine likely to be speedier?

On N800/OS2008 it shows up as "Gecko/20071128 Firefox/3.0a1". FF 3.0 has not yet been released so is Gecko for FF 3.0 still being tuned up?

Re: Webkit N800 browser
 

I think it's Gecko 1.9 which will be used in FF3.0 (and is used in MicroB). The current version of Firefox, v2.x, is using Gecko 1.8. So hopefully Gecko 1.9 will be tuned further prior to release which will improve performance and reduce memory usage etc., but somehow I doubt processor and memory limited devices are their (the Mozilla Foundations) primary target platform.

WebKit on the other hand seems to be targeted towards low powered devices as much as it is the desktop, perhaps due to Apple and Nokias combined influence (Apple/iPhone, Nokia/Symbian S60).

Re: Webkit N800 browser
 

Mozilla also looks in the direction of the mobile devices, but they won't have anything good for this version of Gecko, maybe the next one.

Re: Webkit N800 browser
 

IMHO Having two competitive but friendly teams is a BIG plus. Since the are adressing the same problem from 2 views a solution from one can spark an idea that another can use, modify and feed the whole.

The surplus stores have walls of software(abandonware) that came from very large company's with a single threaded idea of product and market. Heck that gecko engine you're bashing, the UI surrounding it came from an Opera based browser. If Nokia hadn't had parallel theads of development we might be talking what the IT could have been instead of what it is. After all there are what, 5 or 6 (maybe more) media players. They share code, and try different ideas. In the end we win big time.

Re: Webkit N800 browser
 

Has anyone tried building recent versions of the various WebKit based browsers?

I managed to get midori working, but many options seem to be unavailable.

I compiled juniper (http://code.google.com/p/juniper-browser/) against WebKit svn a few days ago, but the resulting code seg faulted :)

And OWB looked like more effort than I felt like spending.

Are there any others that should at least compile under Linux?

Re: Webkit N800 browser
 

Epiphany will use webkit engine in Gnome 2.22, if you ask for linux generally :)
Compiled from the latest svn half a month ago... speedy but unstable yet.