11/17, 8:25am
Flash and AIR betas also bring HW decode
Adobe today fulfilled earlier promises and provided betas for both Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2. Both are the first from Adobe to have a Flash layer that supports multi-touch input, including gestures such as pinching to zoom the window. Flash Player specifically gets H.264 hardware decoding through newer video chipsets and, initially for Windows PCs, can significantly reduce the workload on the CPU or a notebook's battery.
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11/13, 10:35am
RIM's BBerry 9900 and WebKit browser
RIM's rumored BlackBerry 9900 and WebKit-based browser gained corroborating evidence today with a research note from Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu. He points to contacts in the industry and parts suppliers who say the touchscreen slider phone is in development and resembles a cross between the Storm2 and one of RIM's non-touch QWERTY devices. It's currently in the prototype stage and is likely to ship sometime in 2010.
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08/24, 10:40am
RIM Buys Torch for Browser
Software developer Torch Mobile on Monday hinted at Research in Motion's (RIM) future plans for the BlackBerry by confirming that it has been bought out by the Canadian smartphone maker. While the terms of the deal aren't known, Torch explicitly says it expects to bring its experience with developing WebKit-based browsers like Iris to BlackBerry devices. It will similarly continue to develop WebKit as part of its open-source nature.
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07/24, 8:10am
Garmin nuvifone G60 Ships
Garmin today offically threw itself into competition in the touchscreen phone arena by shipping the nüvifone G60 to its first market. The handset is now due to reach Taiwan on July 27th and should reach both Malaysia and Singapore by the end of August. The GPS-centered device is also now deemed "on schedule" for both European and North American launches before the end of the year, though carrier options (if any) and prices have yet to be detailed.
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07/10, 8:30am
Google CEO Talks to Apple
Google chief Eric Schmidt last evening said he would talk to Apple to determine whether or not he should recuse himself from the Mac maker's board of directors following the unveiling of Chrome OS. The executive told those at Allen & Co's technology conference that there is currently "no issue" with his remaining on the board but that he will ask Apple if it sees a conflict of interest to have another desktop operating system developer involved in its decisions. Apple itself hasn't commented on any possible change in relationship.
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06/15, 12:05pm
Samsung Jet
Samsung's phone introductions today have been bolstered by the addition of the Jet, a high-end media device that claims a rare record in the field. The touchscreen uses a Samsung-made 800MHz processor nicknamed the Jet Engine that the company says makes it the fastest full touch phone in existence. To exploit the added speed, the Jet comes with a newer web browser known as Dolfin that uses WebKit for accurate rendering and can not only have as many as five pages active at once but can export websites as widgets for TouchWiz 2.0, which also brings a 3D cube interface for apps and media.
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02/18, 10:00pm
Offline Gmail and Pre Maps
Google held an event at Mobile World Congress to demo several of its latest technologies, including Maps for the Palm Pre and offline Gmail for the iPhone. The Maps webapp is coded completely in HTML5 and uses the integrated WebKit engine instead of working as a native app, while retaining the same functionality, according to Pre Community. The interface supports multitouch input and offers the standard features of the desktop-browser variant.
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02/16, 4:05pm
Custom Chrome for Mac
A primitive Mac version of Google's Chrome browser has been compiled by an independent coder and released to the public. The build, number 9780, is actually based on the development Chromium version of the Mac browser, which is still in a early state and may not produce a formal Mac version of Chrome until as late as June. The custom build is nevertheless said to add working links, and be less than 50ms slower than a recent WebKit nightly build.
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02/13, 12:25pm
Mac Chrome in early phases
The Mac version of Google's Chrome web browser continues to make progress, but at a slow speed, one of its developers hints. Work during the past couple of months is said to have mostly revolved around basic layout tests and WebKit compatibility, and only recently progressed to developing the interface. Links remain non-functional, and renderers are said to regularly crash.
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12/10, 12:05pm
Google Chrome Leaving Beta
Google's Chrome web browser is soon to exit beta thanks partly to a plan to expand its reach, company VP Marissa Miller has told TechCrunch at this year's Le Web conference in Paris. The WebKit-based browser has been relatively slow to gain share since its debut in September but will be marked as a finished product on an upcoming release to let PC makers bundle an officially completed version with their systems.
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11/26, 5:15pm
MacBook graphics errors
Apple is investigating two different graphics issues relating to MacBooks, posters in the company's support forums say. The first is limited to unibody MacBook Pros, but involves a hard lockup during various games, in which the screen goes black, audio loops and no cursor control is possible. The problem affects both Mac and Windows games, and appears to be unrelated to a specific title, since crashes have occurred in games like Call of Duty 4, World of Warcraft and Company of Heroes.
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11/17, 1:30pm
Safari 3.2 causing crashes
Apple's Safari 3.2 release may be causing more problems than are solved for some users, anecdotes indicate. The browser is said to be crashing frequently in some cases, with at least some incidents being preceded by the "beachball" loading icon. It is unknown why the errors might be occurring, but it is thought that they may be connected to Apple's new anti-phishing safeguards, or alternately, the third-party PithHelmet ad-blocking extension.
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11/06, 11:45pm
Microsoft may adopt WebKit
Microsoft's well known Internet Explorer web browser may have an open source sibling on its way based on WebKit, of Safari and Google Chrome fame, if statements made by CEO Steve Ballmer are indicative. TechWorld writes that Ballmer, speaking in front of developers in Sydney, answered a question posed by a student, on why Microsoft insisted on dumping money into the rendering platform, rather than adopting a faster open source model. Ballmer thought the question to be "cheeky," but provided a humble response.
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09/29, 6:10pm
OmniWeb switches to WebKit
The Omni Group has released OmniWeb 5.8, switching the browser's base to the same version of WebKit in use by Safari 3.1. It includes the latest security patches and features of Safari 3.1, including downloadable fonts, CSS animation, HTML 5 media tags and client side database storage. The new version includes upgraded toolbar icons, a Google Chrome user agent option, a bugfix for Leopard's Spaces and support for Non-POSIX file URLs, providing improved compatibility with Dreamweaver and other Carbon and Classic applications.
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09/26, 11:25am
WebKit gets perfect score
Maciej Stachowiak, of the WebKit development team, has announced that a version of the engine underlying Apple's Safari browser has become the first to fully pass the Acid3 test, including the smooth animation rendering test. Acid3 is a test page that scores how well a rendering engine follows defined web standards, including DOM and JavaScript. The test provides a metric for comparing different engines, and has pushed developers to work towards better performance.
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09/19, 1:25pm
SquirrelFish Extreme debut
The team behind WebKit -- the rendering code used in browsers like Chrome and Safari -- says it has developed a dramatically faster version of its JavaScript engine, SquirrelFish. SquirrelFish Extreme is said to use four different technologies, such as bytecode-level optimizations, that together contribute to performance more than twice that of the current engine or 10 times the level in Safari 3.0. Speed is expected to increase as Extreme development progresses.
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09/12, 10:35am
iPhone 2.1 firmware online
Apple has used iTunes to release its promised iPhone 2.1 update to the public. Although it adds the Genius playlist feature also seen in the iPod touch 2.1 firmware, the primary focus is stated to be improving long-standing connection issues, by reducing call drops and "set-up failures." Other iPhone-specific changes include improved accuracy in the 3G signal meter, and better performance in terms of text messaging, with the option for repeating an alert up to two more times for incoming texts.
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09/04, 4:35pm
Brin on Chrome for Mac
The Mac version of Google's Chrome web browser should arrive in "a matter of months," says Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The executive, interviewed by Wall Street Journal writer Kara Swisher, claims it is "embarassing" that a Mac version is not already out, since both he and Swisher use Macs. To cope with the situation, Brin says he is relying on virtualization software from VMware. At present Chrome runs only on Windows.
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09/04, 12:10pm
Chrome EULA, security
Google's newly-launched Chrome browser -- currently Windows-only but expected to launch soon for Mac and Linux -- is already taking some serious criticism, according to various groups. An initial concern was Google's end-user license agreement (EULA), which effectively claimed the right to use anything posted online via the browser, raising issues of both privacy and intellectual property. This language was actually a mistake, Google now claims.
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06/03, 7:15pm
WebKit SquirrelFish
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.
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05/29, 10:30am
Samsung Insists on Safari
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.
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04/11, 4:55pm
Nokia Backing From WebKit
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.
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04/11, 3:25pm
ABI on Mobile Browsers
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.
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03/27, 12:15pm
WebKit gets 100 in Acid3
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.
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03/10, 1:45pm
Webkit most compliant
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.
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02/09, 2:30pm
Safari speed boost
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.
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