Notices

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.

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.

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

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?

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).

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.

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.

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?

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.