But what most of the tech press focused on, for fairly obvious reasons, was the performance: There it was, in all of its hardware accelerated goodness, animating and rendering onscreen objects at a speed that put all other browsers to shame. At that time, and then again at the time of the public preview release of the browser in March, Microsoft highlighted three main topic areas for this browser version-performance, hardware acceleration, and standards interoperability.
I began realizing my mistake about WebKit around the time that Microsoft started discussing its plans for Internet Explorer (IE) 9 last November. And finally, as browsers mature and take advantage of more of the underlying power of the PC, or whatever platform they run within, they can offer more power and functionality but each browser, on each platform, would need to be independently developed to harness this power.
#Leopard webkit update
Second, WebKit isn't distributed like Internet Explorer is if you use WebKit in your own products, you are responsible for keeping it up to date, so it's possible that users could have multiple WebKit versions on their PCs, all with their own update mechanisms. First, there's no such thing as a single WebKit standard, and each browser, on each OS platform, implements it differently. But as I investigated WebKit, and how it's implemented on different desktop and mobile browsers-Google Chrome and Apple Safari use it on PCs-I realized this was a mistake. I used to believe that rallying around a single web rendering engine made sense, and I had even called out WebKit as the possible "standard" around which this could happen. In his letter railing against Adobe, Jobs said that WebKit is "widely adopted," is, in fact, used by "every smartphone web browser other than Microsoft's." While this isn't strictly true, and doesn't address the more diversified desktop market, he confused matters further by then stating that "Apple has set the standard for mobile web browsers." That is, it's not an "international standard " it's "the standard by which other browsers are measured." (This is like confusing the terms "complimentary" and "complementary.") And browser makers, for their part, are embracing web standards like HTML 5, CSS, and so on, though these standards are a mess in the making and are haphazardly implemented from browser to browser.Īpple, of course, uses the WebKit rendering engine in its Safari web browser, on both the desktop (PC/Mac) and on mobile devices (iPhone/iPod).
For example, companies like Adobe and Microsoft make proprietary runtime environments-Flash/AIR and Silverlight, respectively-that make the web more like Windows. Today's web is woefully inadequate from a technical perspective, and various parties have sought to improve matters by offering different solutions for overcoming the limitations. And these issues are aggravated by the fact that the web is an ever-moving, ever-changing target, with standards bodies and the special needs of industry trade groups to deal with.
#Leopard webkit windows
As the web takes the place of traditional Windows applications, developers have new issues to confront around compatibility, connectivity, performance, and functionality. This is an important topic because we're moving, ever more quickly, into a world in which most of the applications and services we consume are delivered via the web. And that topic concerns no less than the future of the web. But one part of his letter really hit home for me, because it touches on a topic I've been mulling over for months. I could write pages and page of text criticizing Jobs for this strange outburst. His charges against Adobe were many, and Jobs spared no ire in his description of Adobe's cross-platform development tools which, heaven forbid, would allow developers to more easily create applications that would run as well on competing platforms as they would on Apple's iPhone. Last week, Apple CEO Steve Jobs published a bizarre public letter in which he attacked Adobe, one of his company's biggest partners. The WebKit Lie and the Future of Web Standards
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