WebKit

Article summary

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.…

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