Webkit Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Happy 10th birthday, WebKit!

by Mike Schramm (Aug 25th, 2011)

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 ...

Apple approves JavaScript iOS games that don't use a browser

by Chris Ward (Apr 28th, 2011)

Look Ma, no WebKit! Your inner geek and nerd should give each other a little hug this morning as you read about the latest rather cool accomplishment of Dominic Szablewski, creator of the Impact JavaScript HTML 5 game engine. He's just released two free games, Biolab Disaster and Drop, which ...

Safari used to hijack MacBook Pro at Pwn2Own 2011

by TJ Luoma (Mar 10th, 2011)

A flaw in WebKit, the engine that underlies Safari, Mobile Safari, and several other browsers, was found to be vulnerable in this year's "Pwn2Own" competition, as reported by ZDNet and many others. This is noteworthy for several reasons: first, because the exploit did not use Flash. You will ...

BlackBerry PlayBook vs. iPad: The challenger looks fast so far

by Sam Abuelsamid (Nov 17th, 2010)

Over the past two years, RIM has been left in the dust by Apple and Google in the smartphone space, and RIM's first crack at a tablet device doesn't arrive until sometime in 2011. Despite the wait for the arrival of the PlayBook, RIM is trying to generate interest in an attempt to get consumers ...

SlideRocket brings web presentations to iPhone and iPad with HTML5

by Michael Rose (Nov 16th, 2010)

Since the dawn of time, traveling professionals have sought easier ways to present on the go. Pico projectors! Netbooks! Converting presentations to video to show them on iPhones! Then there was Keynote on the iPad, and it was good. Not great, however: presenters with libraries of PPT content have ...

Life Browser adds sideswiping, improved page queue

by Michael Rose (Oct 16th, 2010)

Building a better browser for iOS devices is a bit of a Sisyphean task. When you're pitching your product against one of the most successful mobile browsers of all time -- in fact, when you and everyone else trying to hike the trail are simply staging your product atop the underlying WebKit engine ...

Icons and World Clock created with CSS3 magic, courtesy of Webkit

by Brett Terpstra (Jun 28th, 2010)

Recent versions of Webkit, the browser engine that Safari and Chrome are based on, have allowed for extensive use of CSS3, as well as some proprietary CSS tricks. The result has been some very innovative art created entirely using CSS. Take, for example, Louis Harboe's set of iOS icons created using ...

Apple's top technical feats of the decade

by Mike Schramm (Jan 4th, 2010)

We're well into 2010 (OK, 4 days), but there's still a few more lists and "top tens" of the last decade to clean up. One of the more interesting Apple-related wrapups is this list by Fraser Spiers, showing off Apple's best technical feats of the past decade. There's certainly tons of technical ...

Chrome beat Safari in December

by Mike Schramm (Jan 4th, 2010)

Here's an interesting fact that dropped over the weekend: Google Chrome, the browser by the search company with a silly name, actually beat Apple's Safari browser in overall usage during the last month of 2009 (Chrome first beat Safari midway through the month, but new month-long data shows that ...

Inside the new iTunes LP format

by Tim Wasson (Sep 15th, 2009)

With the release of iTunes 9 came iTunes LP. Our own Dave Caolo gave iTunes LP a glowing review, but if you're wondering just how Apple worked their magic with the new format, web developer Jay Robinson has picked it apart thoroughly. As it turns out, simply replacing the ".itlp" extension with ...

WebKit going 3D with WebGL

by Megan Lavey-Heaton (Sep 14th, 2009)

There will be a day in the not-too-distant future when playing 3D games in your browser -- without extra plugins like Flash or Unity -- will be a reality. The WebGL project, which has quickly made the blogging rounds this morning, combines aspects of HTML 5, JavaScript, and the OpenGL 3D ...

3D animations coming to Safari

by Joshua Brickner (Jul 17th, 2009)

Charles Ying over at satine.org has put together an impressive demo using Safari's forthcoming CSS 3D transform features. There is a YouTube video of the demo (you can watch it in the 2nd half of this post), as a nightly build of WebKit or the Snow Leopard version of Safari is required to render ...

From Firefox to Safari (and back again)

by Robert Palmer (Jun 29th, 2009)

I realize I may not be your average browser user. As a web developer, a browser to me is two parts daily use, two parts testing, and one part challenge. Since 2005, I've been using Firefox in some form or fashion as both my primary browser and as a testing vehicle. I had recently started a ...

Livin' on the edge with optimized, beta Firefox builds

by Michael Rose (Feb 8th, 2009)

Do you feel the need... the need for speed? With more and more of our computing lives taking place via our web browsers, eking out even a slight performance improvement for Firefox or Safari (or a similar reduction of resource demands; I'm looking at you, Flash Player) can improve the user ...

CSS Animation to replace need for Flash in MobileSafari? Not likely

by Robert Palmer (Feb 6th, 2009)

New nightly builds of Safari's bleeding-edge doppelgänger, WebKit, are getting some new support for CSS animations -- support that's already available in MobileSafari. The animations, which include a falling leaves effect, a way to simply animate objects sliding across the screen, and a ...