WebKit
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WebKit is a browser engine primarily used in Apple's Safari web browser, as well as almost all web browsers on iOS and iPadOS. WebKit is also used by the PlayStation consoles starting with the PS3, the Tizen mobile operating systems, the Amazon Kindle e-book reader, Nintendo consoles starting with the 3DS Internet Browser, GNOME Web, and the discontinued BlackBerry Browser. WebKit started as a fork of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE, and has since been further developed by KDE contributors, Apple, Google, Nokia, Bitstream, BlackBerry, Sony, Igalia, and others. WebKit supports macOS, Windows, Linux, and various other Unix-like operating systems. On April 3, 2013, Google announced that it had forked WebCore, a component of WebKit, to be used in versions of Google Chrome under the name Blink. Since version 15 in May 2013, Opera web browser dropped its own Presto layout engine in favor of WebKit as implemented by Google in the Chromium project. Its JavaScript engine, JavaScriptCore, also powers the Bun server-side JS runtime, as opposed to V8 used by Node.js, Deno, and Blink. WebKit's C++ application programming interface (API) provides a set of classes to display Web content in windows, and implements browser features such as following links when clicked by the user, managing a back-forward list, and managing a history of pages recently visited.…
WebKit is a browser engine primarily used in Apple's Safari web browser, as well as almost all web browsers on iOS and iPadOS. WebKit is also used by the PlayStation consoles starting with the PS3, the Tizen mobile operating systems, the Amazon Kindle e-book reader, Nintendo consoles starting with the 3DS Internet Browser, GNOME Web, and the discontinued BlackBerry Browser. WebKit started as a fork of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE, and has since been further developed by KDE contributors, Apple, Google, Nokia, Bitstream, BlackBerry, Sony, Igalia, and others. WebKit supports macOS, Windows, Linux, and various other Unix-like operating systems. On April 3, 2013, Google announced that it had forked WebCore, a component of WebKit, to be used in versions of Google Chrome under the name Blink. Since version 15 in May 2013, Opera web browser dropped its own Presto layout engine in favor of WebKit as implemented by Google in the Chromium project. Its JavaScript engine, JavaScriptCore, also powers the Bun server-side JS runtime, as opposed to V8 used by Node.js, Deno, and Blink. WebKit's C++ application programming interface (API) provides a set of classes to display Web content in windows, and implements browser features such as following links when clicked by the user, managing a back-forward list, and managing a history of pages recently visited. WebKit is open source and available under the BSD 2-Clause license with the exception of the WebCore and JavaScriptCore components, which are available under the GNU Lesser General Public License. As of March 7, 2013, WebKit is a trademark of Apple, registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. === Ports === The week after Hyatt announced WebKit's open sourcing, Nokia announced that it had ported WebKit to Symbian and was developing a WebKit-based browser for mobile phones running S60. Named Web Browser for S60, it was used on Nokia, Samsung, LG, and other Symbian S60 mobile phones. Apple has also ported WebKit to iOS for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad, where it is used to render content in the device's web browser and e-mail software. The Android mobile phone platform used WebKit (and later versions its Blink fork) as the basis of its web browser and the Palm Pre, announced January 2009, has an interface based on WebKit. The Amazon Kindle 3 includes an experimental WebKit based browser. In June 2007, Apple announced that WebKit had been ported to Microsoft Windows as part of Safari. Although the company silently discontinued Safari for Windows, WebKit's ports to Microsoft's operating system are still actively maintained. The Windows port uses Apple's proprietary libraries to function and is used for iCloud and iTunes for Windows, whereas the "WinCairo" port is a fully open-source and redistributable port. is a web browser on Linux that uses WebKitGTK.]] WebKit has also been ported to several toolkits that support multiple platforms, such as the GTK toolkit for Linux, under the name WebKitGTK which is used by Eolie, GNOME Web, Adobe Integrated Runtime, Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL), and the Clutter toolkit. Qt Software included a WebKit port in the Qt 4.4 release as a module called QtWebKit (since superseded by Qt WebEngine, which uses Blink instead). The Iris Browser on Qt also used WebKit. The Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) port – EWebKit – was developed (by Samsung and ProFusion ) focusing the embedded and mobile systems, for use as stand alone browser, widgets-gadgets, rich text viewer and composer. The Clutter port is developed by Collabora and sponsored by Robert Bosch GmbH. There was also a project synchronized with WebKit (sponsored by Pleyo) called Origyn Web Browser, which provided a meta-port to an abstract platform to make porting to embedded or lightweight systems quicker and easier. This port is used for embedded devices such as set-top boxes and PMP and it has been ported into AmigaOS, AROS, and MorphOS. MorphOS version 1.7 is the first version of Origyn Web Browser (OWB) supporting HTML5 media tags.
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