Happy 10th birthday, WebKit!

As AppleOutsider notes, the WebKit engine that powers both Safari and Chrome, as well as the browsers on the iPhone and the iPad, turned ten years old yesterday. We meant to mark the occasion on the date itself, but unforeseen circumstances forced us to juggle things around a bit. Sorry about that, WebKit. Stop crying and eat your cake!

Of course, the actual code wasn't released to the public until much later, and the project itself wasn't announced to the public until 2003. But if you go back in the repository, you can see the first commit was made ten years ago yesterday.

Ten years later WebKit is found all over the place. It's in various operating systems, every leading mobile browser (and most of the desktop ones), inside Steam's user interface, and some parts of Adobe's creative software. Happy belated birthday, then, to the code that's brought a lot of usefulness to developers and their users, and here's to many more years of use.

View Tags

Source: http://www.appleoutsider.com/2011/08/24/webkit/

Categories

Software Apple

As AppleOutsider notes, the WebKit engine that powers both Safari and Chrome, as well as the browsers on the iPhone and the iPad, turned...

Add a Comment

Sign in »

3 Comments

Filter by:

keithpk

You should go by the word of Don Melton, who actually started WebKit at Apple:

"ATTENTION INTERNETS! WebKit is not 10 years old today. That happened on June 25. I know the date because that's when I started the project." (http://twitter.com/#!/donmelton/status/106603038575296512)

And yes, as Till pointed out, there was an internal CVS repository much earlier than the public SVN one.

August 25 2011 at 12:08 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Till

By the way: the fact that you appear to have missed the birthday by one day seems not to matter, as the first comment linked above reads: "New repository initialized by cvs2svn."

This suggests that there existed a previous CVS repository before that! And the fact that with the 4th commit a couple of dozens of source files where checked in at once indicates that development is somewhat older than the "birthday" August 24th 2001:

http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/4

So no worries, you might have missed the birthday even by a couple of weeks (if not months) anyway ;)

Cheers

August 25 2011 at 10:14 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Till

It is worth mentioning that WebKit rose from the KHTML project - KDE web engine project and KDE being one of the well-known Linux desktop environments. And while we're at it, the Linux kernel turned 20 years to the day as well!

What a glorious day it was today!

Uhm... why did Steve decide to quit on this very date again as well? ;)

August 25 2011 at 9:58 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply