Safari on the iPhone: Congratulations, WebKit!

Congratulations and kudos to both the WebKit community and the iPhone Safari team!

In case you haven’t heard - hey, there might be someone out there who’s really out of the loop :-), on Tuesday Apple announced that the iPhone ships with a version of Safari. Like the Nokia browser, it’s apparent from the online demo that the iPhone version of Safari seeks to offer a rich, “desktop-like” web browsing experience on mobile devices.

My first impression: it’s great to learn that Apple shares the vision of what some of us around here call the “One True Web”. Check out this quote from The Obligatory iPhone Post on the Surfin Safari blog:

Think about the impressive browsing experience of the iPhone, as well as products
like Nokia’s S60 Browser (based on WebKit) and the number of higher-end phones
featuring Opera. Increasingly, you can browse the real web on a phone and have
a high quality experience. There is less and less need for a special dumbed down
version of the web just for mobile devices; instead we can have a single
device-independent web that’s presented in the best possible way on a variety of
devices.

I couldn’t agree more. To me, based on the reaction throughout the blogosphere, it seems that Apple’s high-profile announcement has already changed most people’s perceptions and expectations of mobile web browsing. Now more than ever perhaps the “content designed for the desktop is simply unusuable on mobile devices” meme is finally wearing out.

Apple’s move may also be a significant step in avoiding the dreaded Browser Wars in the mobile browsing market [*]. As we all know, browser fragmentation does not benefit anyone, so anything that helps to prevent a future recuurence of the desktop browser wars can only be a Good Thing.

So with Nokia and Apple mass producing pre-installed WebKit based mobile browsers, will the thriving, open-source WebKit project become THE dominant engine for mobile browsers?

Of course only time will tell, but I personally believe it looks like it’s off to a strong start: WebKit is unquestionably going places.

To the WebKit community, my congratulations!! And to everyone else, why not get involved?

[* Some background is probably worthwhile. As another post noted the Nokia browser runs on top of a version of WebKit. WebKit, an active open-source project that's driven by Apple, grew out of a heavily modified branch of the KHTML and KJS code from the KDE project. Last year Nokia released the source to S60WebKit, a port of WebKit to the S60 platform, and the engines behind the Nokia browser. We are currently developing S60WebKit on a branch in WebKit's public Subversion source code repository. There is already work underway to merge the S60 branch to the WebKit main branch of development.]