WebKit and the N800

Posted by George Wright Tue, 07 Aug 2007 16:59:00 GMT

For the past few days Alp Toker and I at Collabora have been working on integrating WebKit with the abstract browser user interface on the Nokia N800. Thanks to Nokia’s Engine Abstraction Layer (EAL) we were able to compile (with much difficulty) WebKit for the N800 and create our own EAL which provided hooks for the Nokia browser interface to communicate with WebKit.

Some of you may wonder why we are even bothering with this project. Well, for a start, WebKit is significantly smaller than Gecko and renders pages significantly better than Opera does (in my opinion). It also has a built in SVG renderer and has an active community surrounding its development. And, of course, it has its roots in the KDE project. Additionally, it’s run as a serious open source project and they do things the right way for open source, which is fantastic.

So far the port has been fairly successful. After a little setback we were soon on the ball and managed to get a proof of concept EAL working with WebKit rendering Google’s homepage.


Collabora’s website in WebKit

By now we’ve managed to implement a few more hooks thus making more browser functions work, such as changing URL, going forwards/backwards in history etc, but it still needs a bit of ironing out - although the basic implementation is there and surprisingly usable.


This blog

There’s still quite a lot of work to be done, such as improving the rendering performance (it’s pretty good, but it still feels a little slow), adding input focus signals to WebKit GTK (to let us know when to bring the on screen keyboard out), and context menu entries (for right clicking). There’s also a slight problem with the rendering such that native widget theming isn’t great due to Hildon’s use of non-scalable widgets but we’ll be working on that.


Choosing the rendering engine

At the moment we’re still developing this on our own but Alp and I are hoping to make a public release when the port has stabilised a bit.

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  1. Xan said about 13 hours later:

    Check the latest sapwood trunk in maemo (https://stage.maemo.org/svn/maemo/projects/haf/trunk/sapwood/), we now support downscaling of the theme graphics. This should make having native widgets on the browser possible.

  2. Tobias said about 16 hours later:

    Any chance to get this for the 770 too ?

  3. Xan said 1 day later:

    Check the latest sapwood trunk in maemo (https://stage.maemo.org/svn/maemo/projects/haf/trunk/sapwood/), Tommi added support for downscaling of the theme graphics. This should make having good looking “native” widgets on the browser possible.

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    Definitely looking out for the release of this. Will this also work for the Hackers Edition of Bora? MicroB is a little slow on this edition…

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    Is there a release for os2008 ?

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