June 3 - 7:15pm EDT   The WebKit development team on Tuesday unveiled a new JavaScript rendering engine called SquirrelFish for the open source browser, making the browser perform 1.6 times faster on the SunSpider benchmark. SquirrelFish is billed as a register-based, direct threaded, high-level bytecode engine with a sliding register window calling convention. The engine was designed around current theories and research progress performed by professors, and developers of the Lua programming language. [full story]

May 29 - 10:30am EDT   Samsung is still insisting that it can call the L870's web browser Safari, according to a Samsung spokesperson contacted by Phone Arena. While the cellphone is now believed to just have a standard version of the Nokia Mini Map browser, which shares much of Safari's WebKit rendering engine, a Samsung media official continues to refer to the phone's web app as a Symbian Series S60 version of the "Safari browser" and equates it to the Nokia software. Press materials also continue to mention Safari. [full story]

April 11 - 4:55pm EDT   Nokia may be withdrawing its efforts to actively contribute to the WebKit browser engine, according to an exchange on the official developer list. After noticing that the Finnish cellphone producer had been inactive for at least eight months in developing a version of the code for Symbian Series 60 phones, contributor Eric Seidel has been told by Nokia representative Bradley Morrison only that the company is closing off discussions of any outstanding bugs rather than fixing or improving code. [full story]

April 11 - 3:25pm EDT   Continuing a string of research on the cellphone industry, ABI Research today said in a new report that it expects the use of mobile webbrowsers to grow ten times its size in the next five years. The analysis firm estimates that 76 million copies of browsers were in use by the end of 2007 but that this should grow to 700 million by 2013. The surge is credited to a surge in smartphone use, which is expected to bring full web browsing as well as a greater number of mobile-oriented websites. [full story]

March 27 - 12:15pm EDT   The Apple-originated WebKit, an underpinning of software such as the Safari web browser, has become the first public rendering engine to get a perfect Acid3 score, its developers claim. Acid3 is a test site produced by the Web Standards Project, and is used to gauge the conformity of a web browser to both standards and technologies, such as JavaScript. Most browsers fall well short of a 100/100 ranking, such as Firefox 2 -- which scores approximately 53 -- and Safari 3.1, which reaches 75. [full story]

March 10 - 1:45pm EDT   The future of the Safari web browser has been a topic of great interest lately, and some MacNN forum members have discovered that Webkit – Safari's developmental alter ego – is so far the most compliant with next generation web standards. According to the forum members' findings, WebKit and Safari 3.1 receive the highest scores on the Acid3 compliancy tests at 90-percent and 74-percent respectively, while Camino 2.0a1, Firefox 3.0b5, and Seamonkey 2.0a1 come in third place at 69-percent. [full story]

February 9 - 2:30pm EST   Apple's Safari web browser is about to get a large speed boost, if the current development version is giving an accurate depiction of what users can expect in the finished browser. Seth Weintraub, a writer for Computerworld's Apple blog, has been testing WebKit – Apple's developer version of the KHTML-based browser – and says that performance typically peaks at 2.5 times that of Safari, even in its currently unoptimized state. [full story]