16 Facts About WebKit

WebKit is a browser engine developed by Apple and primarily used in its Safari web browser, as well as all iOS web browsers.

WebKit is used by the BlackBerry Browser, PlayStation consoles beginning from the PS3, the Tizen mobile operating systems, a browser included with the Amazon Kindle e-book reader, and on Nintendo consoles beginning from the 3DS Internet Browser and onward.

WebKit is 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.

Code that would become WebKit began in 1998 as the KDE HTML layout engine and KDE JavaScript engine.

The WebKit project was started within Apple by Don Melton on June 25,2001, as a fork of KHTML and KJS.

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WebKit team had reversed many Apple-specific changes in the original WebKit code base and implemented platform-specific abstraction layers to make committing the core rendering code to other platforms significantly easier.

On June 2,2008, the WebKit project announced they rewrote JavaScriptCore as "SquirrelFish", a bytecode interpreter.

WebKit2 had "an incompatible API change from the original WebKit", which motivated its name change.

WebKit has been adopted as the rendering engine in OmniWeb, iCab and Web and Sleipnir, replacing their original rendering engines.

WebKit is used to render HTML and run JavaScript in the Adobe Integrated Runtime application platform.

In June 2007, Apple announced that WebKit had been ported to Microsoft Windows as part of Safari.

The Enlightenment Foundation Libraries port – EWebKit – was developed focusing the embedded and mobile systems, for use as stand alone browser, widgets-gadgets, rich text viewer and composer.

Web Platform for Embedded is a WebKit port designed for embedded applications; it further improves the architecture by splitting the basic rendering functional blocks into a general-purpose routines library, platform backends, and engine itself.

In relation to Opera Software's announcement earlier in the year that it would switch to WebKit by means of the Chromium codebase, it was confirmed that the Opera web browser would switch to Blink.

WebKit passes the Acid2 and Acid3 tests, with pixel-perfect rendering and no timing or smoothness issues on reference hardware.

On June 2,2008, the WebKit project announced they rewrote JavaScriptCore as "SquirrelFish", a bytecode interpreter.