June 15 - 12:05pm EDT   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. [full story]

February 18 - 10:00pm EST   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. [full story]

February 16 - 4:05pm EST   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. [full story]

February 13 - 12:25pm EST   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. [full story]

December 10 - 12:05pm EST   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. [full story]

November 26 - 5:15pm EST   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. [full story]

November 17 - 1:30pm EST   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. [full story]

November 6 - 11:45pm EST   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. [full story]

September 29 - 6:10pm EDT   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. [full story]

September 26 - 11:25am EDT   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. [full story]

September 19 - 1:25pm EDT   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. [full story]

September 12 - 10:35am EDT   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. [full story]

September 4 - 4:35pm EDT   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. [full story]

September 4 - 12:10pm EDT   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. [full story]

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]