Samsung preps mobile browser based on Apple’s WebKit

“The industry said on September 23 that Samsung Electronics began developing a WebKit-based mobile browser. WebKit is an open source web browser engine, and it is also a base engine for Apple’s web browser ‘Safari’ and Google’s Android browser,” Hwang Tae-ho reports for Korean IT News.

“The ‘Advanced Software Platform Lab’ at the Samsung Information Systems America R&D Center located in Silicon Valley scouted a number of WebKit professionals and started the development of the WebKit-based mobile browser,” Hwang reports.

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Note: The WebKit project was started within Apple by Don Melton on June 25, 2001. As of July 2012 it has the most market share of any layout engine at over 40% of the browser market share according to StatCounter. Apple made WebKit open source in June 2005.

27 Comments

  1. So not only do they promote their competitor in TV advertisements, now they will have to add the Apple trademark to their packaging.
    Brilliant!
    Who @ Samsung thinks up this stuff? Someone @ Apple wants to thank you for the continual FREE advertising…

        1. Actually you just might be, with such broken English.

          As for the web dying? Forget it. The web is what SAVED all of us from Microsoft taking over the computing world, since it couldn’t be tied directly into the Windows architecture. They tried their best with Internet Exploder, but they let it stagnate and better browsers eventually ran over it.

  2. Very interesting……. Does this mean they are biting the hand that feeds them? Even they do not want google’s browser on Google’s Android amd want to cut Google’s profits from the data Google mines from it? Or are they building the blocks of their own OS ( doubtful)? I smell lots more trouble for Android and Samsung…..

      1. Be that as it may, what WTF said was correct. WebKit was based on KHTML, the open source rendering engine for KDE’s “Konqueror” browser. Doesn’t make it any less the property of Apple, but its origins do require it to be open source.

        ——RM

        1. Yes LordRobin! Apple owns nothing of WebKit’s code. It is entirely open source because the original source of the code was open source. Two parts of WebKit are licensed under GNU LGPL v2.1. The third part is licensed under the BSD v2.0.

          I.E., it is entirely wrong to use the phrase ‘Apple’s WebKit’. However, Apple started this branch off the original KDE projects, named it and shepherd it. Therefore, Apple receive credit as one of its parents, but never owner.

        2. No, Derek, Apple owns ALL of WebKit’s code and when some one adds to it, that code, under the license agreement, becomes part of it. Apple merely gives an open license to anyone to USE their intellectual property under the GNU license format in exchange for that. Apple is the copyright owner. It is specifically stated. Apple owns many other open source code software that they allow to be licensed under GNU, such as CUPS. You are wrong. Someone has to own any open source code, and be the licensor. In this case, it is Apple.

  3. As usual, the completion copies the wrong things. They have flashy product introductions (Surface II) but no price or availability. They want to differentiate their pirducts, but thy do it by backing dead tech like Flash or relatively useless things like NFC. They want to pretend they are premium brands, but they shit out different versions of their phones every three weeks.

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