Nokia Releases S60 Web Browser: AJAX on Mobile?
Nokia has formally released its Series 60 Web Browser as open source in this year’s World Wide Web Conference in Edinburg reports MobileMonday. The Nokia S60 Webkit is now officially part of the Webkit Open Source Project which also covers the Safari Browser used in MacOSX.
Nokia today announced at the World Wide Web Conference 2006 in Edinburgh the source code for S60 WebKit. This is the engine for Web Browser for S60.
Nokia sees this as a marking a turning point in the drive toward an open code base for web browsers used on mobile devices.
S60 WebKit source code will enable reduced fragmentation in the next generation of mobile browsers, simplifying content development for the mobile web and accelerating adoption of mobile browsing by millions of smartphone users worldwide.
Nokia previously announced it would be basing its S60 web browser based on the KHTML engine. This is the same engine Webkit used by the Safari Browser is based on. Now, they have finally decided to open source it. An interesting note is that now the Webkit for S60 will be the same one as Safari. Therefore, web-only features such as Javascript are now available. This potentially allows the use of AJAX in the mobile environment. This, in turn, will allow the proliferation of “intelligent” web applications to be deployed on mobile phones too. AJAX on Mobile? Here is the current feature set: W3C’s HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, CSS 1, 2, & 3 (partially), DOM 1, 2, SVG-Tiny, and Web standards such as, ECMAScript, Netscape style plug-ins such as Flash Lite and Audio playback.
I also hope that phone manufacturers may want to utilize this web core too. This can potentially allow cross-handset interoperability to be made easier. Right now, getting a WAP site to look nice on multiple mobile phone browsers is an exercise in patience and frugality. This is definitely speaking from experience. It is also interesting to note that Samsung, Panasonic and Lenovo have released S60-based phones.
PS. Another nice thing about this is that while browsing Forum Nokia I noticed that Nokia has released Carbide. Carbide.c++ Express is the first in a family of Eclipse-based development environments targeting Symbian OS C++ development. However, it is not open source. Maybe not yet. Carbide is important as it is used to build the open source S60 browser code.
May 25th, 2006 at 4:41 pm
This combined with the potential of .mobi to change the internet landscape into a mobile-friendly one could not only create an ease of use on these devices, but a wealth of money to be made. I think its only a matter of time.