Posts Tagged ‘webkit’

Up until now we have seen Mozilla, Opera, Chrome and Internet Explorer competing with Apple Safari in the web browser market but now a new player named Bolt has also entered into the arena. Developed by Bitstream, the Bolt browser is aimed at offering fully fledged Internet browsing on low profile mobile phones. The beta version of Bolt is now available for download at boltbrowser.com.

Like Opera the Bistream has also got clusters of servers that are dedicated to fetch web pages and compress them into proprietary code so that they can be downloaded at the client side in no time, even if the phone’s processing speed is slow. According to Bitstream the compression used by them more intense as compared to the Opera’s compression and thus the Bolt’s operating speed is much better. The Bolt can be used on low-end mobile phones, not just high-end models like the HTC Touch HD, but does not sacrifices performance and functionality. It offers full Internet browsing experience and has got built-in streaming support for YouTube videos.

Bolt is based on Webkit, the same web engine that works behind Apple Safari but the Bolt introduces some unprecedented features like ‘split screen mode’. Apart from this the new browser has got all the standard functions such as favourites, history, RSS feeds, address bar, auto complete etc.

Google is marching forward on the upgrade path. Recently this popular search engine company surprised millions of Internet users by launching its first web browser called Chrome 1.0 and now within a short time span it has upgraded the browser and released the new Alpha version called Chrome 2.0.

Chrome 2.0 has got some very significant improvements over its predecessor. It’s now more flexible, speedy, user friendly and holds loads of useful functions. You can now get tools like auto complete text fields, full page zoom, enhanced spelling checker and improved auto scroll function. According to Google the alpha release of the second version of Chrome is far much reliable and faster as compared to the Chrome 1.0 and other web browsers too. It now also allows the users to import bookmarks from Google Bookmarks. On top of all these upgrades lies a unique feature called ‘Profiles’ that is not found in any of the web browsers till date. Chrome 2.0 Profiles are same as the Windows user profiles. The only difference is that here you can set and maintain different profiles for web browsing preferences such as browser settings, bookmarks, history and cookies. Clearly Google was not content with simply entering the mobile phone and mobile OS market with its G1 Android run smartphone, which is directly targeted at dethroning the Apple iPhone 3G. The Internet Search engine giant is also intent on challenging Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and of course Apple’s Safari browser.

Chrome 2.0 Alpha uses a new WebKit rendering engine that enables advanced CSS coding functions including reflections, masks, gradients, and canvas drawing. This engine is the same as the one that is used in the Apple Safari 3.1.

Once again the alarms are sounding with regards to Apple Safari’s security. Recently it has been found that the Safari’s RSS feeds are not safe to use, both on the Mac and PC. This application is vulnerable to hacker attacks and it can allow any malicious web site to bring you some really serious repercussions when using Safari to capture RSS feeds.

Once trapped by the malicious site the hackers can read files on your hard disk drive. This can lead to the access to sensitive information such as e-mails, passwords, cookies or any other private data. Even the whole user account can be taken in control by the intruders and the whole process is completely transparent to the user. The interesting fact is that this security loophole has been identified by Apple itself but it hasn’t been fixed till now. So it’s highly recommended not to use Safari for RSS.

The problem is believed to be emerged due to some issues with the Apple’s Webkit. This is because the OmniWeb users are also in the danger zone. OmniWeb is the browser used in Mac machines, like the Apple MacBook, and uses the WebKit rendering engine. RSS Feeds were introduced in Safari in 2004 but this is the first time that it has also joined the family of vulnerable applications.

One of the best things about Apple’s Safari is the fact that it Is an open source project and in this regard then, it is leagues ahead of the Internet explorer for the simple reason that it comes unbound and doesn’t necessitate you to have an ‘ MSN Messenger” or something that you don’t want to use.

Open Source projects are usually free or come at a very low cost compared to the commercial projects. Also, they have a thriving and very supporting community of developers who always stand by to help you when you have trouble.
In the case of apple now, since they have used an open source project called as Webkit, you are not struck with the apple’s staff to help you out of technical problems but you have a full community of people like you who would have used or developed or both with regards to the software in question.

According to Apple’s developer pages and webkit’s Home page:

“ WebKit is an open source web browser engine. WebKit is also the name of the Mac OS X system framework version of the engine that’s used by Safari, Dashboard, Mail, and many other OS X applications. WebKit’s HTML and JavaScript code began as a branch of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE. This website is also the home of S60’s S60 WebKit development..”

Also, it might be heartening to note that webkit’s primary responsibility is ‘security’ - -so even if multiple cases are reported about Apple’s Security and the bugs, it is only a mater of time when everything gets sorted out.