I'd like to hear about how WebKit went mobile for the iPhone. Eg if Apple worked with Nokia and their port of WebKit to Symbian, or started their own port from scratch.
WebKit was open sourced roughly a week (June 7, 2005) before Nokia announced the port to their phone (June 13, 2005). That means that Nokia was able to do the port in less than a week with (presumably) a few competent developers.
As the other person said, you must be kidding if you think Apple worked with Nokia.
Did you read any of the posts that have been flying by?
WebKit was a project shrouded in almost total secrecy until it's announcement as Safari and was clearly done at Apple and based on KTHML/KJS.
Not only that, what would make the mobile version "special" (besides dealing with touch input and screen resolution)? Don't you remember Jobs' comments about it being the "full" internet?
Going further, why on Earth would Apple even hint to Nokia that they were working on the iPhone?
> WebKit was open sourced roughly a week (June 7, 2005) before Nokia announced the port to their phone (June 13, 2005). That means that Nokia was able to do the port in less than a week with (presumably) a few competent developers.
While the ex-Nokia developers I've met have all been excellent engineers, they certainly didn't port WebKit to their mobile devices in under a week. June 7, 2005 marks the date that Apple started WebKit as an open source project. That is, on that date the CVS repository and Bugzilla instance were made publicly available. For over two years prior to that point Apple had been publishing the source code of the two main components of WebKit, JavaScriptCore and WebCore, alongside Safari releases. Nokia's port of WebKit to Symbian was based on those releases, and it wasn't until late 2006[1] that Nokia started developing against the current WebKit SVN repository.
Fair enough. But the point remains that I doubt Apple would have needed Nokia's help porting their own code to their own secret platform. It would have been commercial suicide practically to let a competitor know.
AFAIK, Nokia started work on making WebKit mobile before Apple did (I could easily be wrong). There was presumably a fair amount of work making WebKit work well on mobile devices so I'm wondering what influence Nokia's port had on the iOS port. Perhaps Apple completely ignored it or perhaps they only put WebKit on the iPhone because of Nokia's work.
I wonder, too, how hampered Nokia was by trying to port it to an existing platform, presumably striving for a lot of backwards compatability. Nokia, at the time, had many popular handsets available, of varying power/capabilities/providers. Apple was designing a new phone, a single piece of hardware, a single provider.
Obviously the products may be been developed much earlier, but the Webkit browser on Nokia N95 was released to the market before the iPhone was released in 2007.
WebKit core gets commits from nearly every major hardware manufacturer and OS vendor that isn't Microsoft. Unless Apple's stripping all those commits out of spite, iOS WebKit contains code from Nokia, RIM, Samsung, HPalm, Google, and many others that might be seen as competitors otherwise.
Adobe is more or less neutral, though (they just want you to buy their tools). Apple, Nokia, RIM, Samsung, etc. all would very much like the others to cease existing; yet they're all contributing to a project that keeps each other on a level playing field (in the context of HTML/JS engines, anyway).
I think the point is that Apple didn't treat Safari/Webkit as being a competitive advantage so much as nullifying a competitive disadvantage -- it was a defensive play, not an offensive play. (A nice analogy is Android, which Google developed out of fear they would miss out on the mobile market rather than out of any desire to "own" the mobile market. Google didn't want Apple or anyone else to own its destiny, just as Apple didn't want Microsoft to own its destiny.)
