About a year and a half ago, I wrote a book called WebKit for Dummies. For those of you who may not know, WebKit is a browser engine. A browser engine is similar to the engine in a car…it does the most important work, but isn’t seen or thought about by most people. The browser engine is responsible for retrieving Web pages, parsing them, rendering them, and displaying them back to you. Also like automotive engines, multiple Web browsers may use the same browser engine to accomplish these very important tasks. What’s left — things like the menus and buttons and operating system integration — is what makes one browser different from another.
WebKit is a particularly important browser engine because it currently powers two of the most popular desktop browsers: Apple Safari and Google Chrome. It also sits under the hood of a huge majority of the smartphone browsers. The list of mobile browsers that use WebKit includes iPhone/iPad, Android, Blackberry, and Samsung.
The premise of my book was that such widespread adoption of the WebKit engine was creating a way for Web developers to write mobile apps that could be written once, and then would run the same on any mobile device.
It all seemed so simple! Everyone was moving towards WebKit and things seemed to be going exactly as I had planned. Until….in early April, Google announced that they are leaving the WebKit family to start their own browser engine, called Blink. So, Google messed everything up, but in a good way!
The problem with my original idea (which wasn’t really my idea…lots of other smart people thought it too), was that it put too much importance on WebKit. This was necessary, because publishers like to have a hook and WebKit was a very hot topic in 2011. WebKit has certainly advanced the state of the Web, but the real big deal pushing us towards the universal app platform we all want so badly is HTML5….which is still a ways from being universally implemented.
One of the reasons Google left WebKit is because WebKit, being an open source project with a whole lot of stakeholders, doesn’t move fast enough for Google. So Google is starting with the current WebKit code and creating their new and improved version from it (“forking it”). The list of changes they propose has me drooling, I have to say.
The result of Google’s dumping of WebKit may very well be a 2nd great browser war (or, would this be the third?). Unlike the first one (which was between Netscape and Internet Explorer for those of you who may not have been there), the battle now isn’t over who can make up the greatest number of crazy new features that no other browser supports, but over who can implement the latest crazy new features of the HTML5 standards (or, at least, proposed standards) the fastest.
I believe that more competition in the browser world will increase the speed of HTML5 adoption, and will benefit us all!
-Chris
p.s. If you ignore the first 2 chapters of WebKit for Dummies (which are specifically about WebKit), the book is about this very thing (creating mobile apps with HTML5) and so you should buy it!
p.p.s. Or, pre-order my new book (coming out in August): Beginning HTML5 and CSS3 for Dummies.
p.p.p.s. Or, better yet, take our online class, Creating Mobile Apps with HTML5, which is constantly being updated to reflect new developments on the Web! A new session starts on May 15. Read reviews and find out more here!