Webkit Becomes Perfect, S60 Browser To Benefit
Webkit is the Open Source Web engine on which many browsers are based, like Mac OSx’ Safari, S60’s Web browser, the iPhone’s Safari browser, and Goggle Android’s browser in the future. Webkit has recently received an update that has upped the performance of the engine to a perfect 100/100 score on Acid3.
This is great news for the S60 community, as this promises us an even better rendering and performance of our Web browsers. The new release has already been implemented in the iPhone SDK’s beta 2, but isn’t available to the general iPhone user. On our Symbian side, we’ll have to wait for the new release to reach the Nokia and S60 headquarters, and then we’ll have to wait for another firmware upgrade that could bring this perfection to our handsets. Although this might take some time, with firmware upgrades taking Nokia ages to achieve, we are still bumped about it.
Here’s an excerpt from the WebKit development page:
With r31342 WebKit has become the first publicly available rendering engine to achieve 100/100 on Acid3. The final test, test 79, was a brutal torture test of SVG text rendering. Details of the bugs we fixed will follow. Indeed, we found a critical bug in the test itself that would have forced a violation of the SVG 1.1 standard to pass, so until a few hours ago it was not possible to get a valid 100/100. Acid3 test editor Ian Hickson has the details.
[Via: IntoMobile]
Sorry, but WebKit is most certainly not perfect. At the moment, WebKit does just barely enough to pass a couple of the SVG SMIL tests - but that implementation is not yet usable, unfortunately.
Only those of you with ‘current’ (read that as ‘Brand New’) devices may ever see this browser in a firmware update. That is because only ‘current’ devices are getting firmware updates. Nokia hasn’t offered an update for my E61 in over a year, despite the outstanding issues with it. Nor for my wife’s N80, nor my friends E70, nor for another friends N95-3 (this may be coming some day). Nothing like buying a high-end device only to find it doesn’t work as advertised and maybe never will.
NOKIA!!! It’s your hardware, your software, your developers - your responsibility! I’d even be willing to pay a nominal fee to purchase an updated firmware! All you have to do is make it!
@Dave thanks for chiming in, but I don’t know that you could really argue that your devices don’t ‘work as advertised’. I’ve owned the N80 and now the N95-3, and both do everything I was led to believe they would. I can’t speak for the E61/E70, as I haven’t owned either, but given they’re S60, I’d assume it’s the same.
What abilities were you let to believe they had, that they in fact don’t?
One would think that you could update a browser without having to go thru the hassle of doing the entire OS, but that is something that seems to be not quite there when it comes to mobile operating systems.
As much as this is indeed a good thing, making sure that Webkit correctly uses the @media handheld property for its shrink to fit modes on mobiles would be even nicer.
@antoine
yup, if they want to advertise as “it’s what computers have become” well then i’m not interested. I have a lot more control over what goes on my computer and it’s upgrades.