NMokia created a web browser for its Series 60 smartphones about a year ago. The browswer was based on opensource technology in order “to save cost”, according to Nokia.
Now, Nokia had released the code for their browser under a BSD-Style licence for everyone to use. Nokia officially say that they want to reduce the diversity in mobile internet software-but if you ask me personally, this is just a move to get cheap mainstream media attention.
Because, um, Series 60 is like no other platform. It has no touchscreen support and has a very proprietary API that no other OS can emulate. So, the released code will probably never ever be ported to other platforms, and will remain only on Series 60, which is-if we all recall correctly-property ok Nokia. So, any developer fixing a bug in the released code is basically doing Nokia’s job without receiving a salary from them!
The availabiolity of a good web browser is what makes a mopbile platform stand or fall IMHO. The Palm OS would be much farther by now if PalmSource had backported their Web Browser 3.0 from Cobalt to Garnet, or if the Minimo porting project started a bit of time ago would have succeeded.
To cut a long story short. Cool. Another sourceforge project. But I don’t really care!
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Web Browser 3.0 uses the same ACCESS core that’s used in Blazer on all of the modern Palm devices. It had a few UI features such as limited “tabs” support, but those were mainly possible because of the architectural changes in Palm OS Cobalt. From what I’ve seen, Blazer 4.5 ends up being a more usable browser than PalmSource’s Web Browser 3.0 in most ways with its better caching control, improved bookmarking system, and integration with the phone application.
I tried Web Browser 3.0 some time ago in the Cobalt Simulator, but I couldn’t access the internet. The only thing I could test were a few offline HTML files. Unfortunetly I don’t know the speed or more about the rendering. Waht I know is that it supports tabs (but only 3 imho)
I used Blazer 4.5 in the Treo Simulator, and I noticed that it often didn’t show a site (it was too big).
Alexander
Just to rebut what you stated above. If you will investigate the S60 Browser source code at http://wiki.opendarwin.org/index.php/S60Webkit, you will notice that most of the code is platform independent. There are no more API calls to specific OS dependent features in the S60 port than there are in the Apple version. It is the KWQ and a majority of the WebKit stuff that is platform dependent (i.e. plugins would have to be handled differently in the PalmOS then say S60, Windows or the MacOS).
Of a matter of fact, I have begun a port of the JavaScriptCore and have all of the source files compiled. i am just having issues with linking because, 1) I don’t know C++, 2) I have not included functions such as malloc, free, new, delete, etc. in the code, 3) I have never really created an ARM project 100% from scratch.
It is extremely portable and it may be better suited in the memory department. From what I here, MiniMo is a memory hog (the reason for Nokia choosing WebKit in the first place, if you recal, they looked at MiniMo first).
Anyway, Nokia has had plans to make the WebKit code open source since December of last year.
Note, when I say:
“There are no more API calls to specific OS dependent features in the S60 port than there are in the Apple version.”
That is just pure observation and speculation. I have not actually counted, but there is no reason for there to be more (only reason would be because S60 is a mobile platform).
An extra note:
I find the S60 Browser and Apple’s Safari (basically a consumer edition of Apple’s WebKit) to be model browsers.
Also, for PalmSource’s Web Browser 3.0 to work, you must enable a could different options in the Cobalt Simulator. One is WinSOCK redirection (I believe). this is because of the API and architecture change.
You could back port it, but you would loose the ability to load two different pages in different tabs at the same time (not a biggy I guess) and a few other little features.
Hi,
thank you for the insightful comments!
Best regards
Tam Hanna
Some free nokia themes:
http://www.66mobile.com/themes/index.php