Hacker News Reader

Comment by cpeterso | Hacker News Reader

Will Android and Windows become "tier 2" platforms in Apple's WebKit tree? Who, besides Google's Chrome team, cared about WebKit on Windows?

View on HN

Well, Apple does. They use WebKit to render the iTunes store.

https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2013-April/024...

It seems like it up to QT port to handle windows.

https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2013-April/024...: We are also maintaining the WebKit1 Windows port at Apple.

Apple also supports Safari on Windows.

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1531

"Supports" maybe (is it up to date with WebKit security fixes?), but definitely no longer maintains or develops. Safari 6 is not available for Windows. There have been no updates to Safari for Windows in almost a year, and no new feature releases in almost two years.

On that matter, I wonder why they didn't continue to provide security updates for 5.x when they decided to continue support for Snow Leopard, like MS did with IE.

Maxthon and Qihoo are both major browser vendors in China who provide dual-engine (Trident and WebKit) browsers for Windows. I don't know whether they contribute code to the Windows WebKit port, or whether they do/will use Chromium/Blink.

How do dual-engine browsers work? Do you manually switch between engines? Is there some sort of automatic "this page looks better in this engine" determination that happens?

There's probably a whitelist of sites that still require Trident. The reason for this is that there are a lot of Chinese websites that are still only IE6-compatible (this is a result of many Chinese installs of Windows being pirated copies of XP running IE6 - they don't want to upgrade to new versions of IE or Windows for fear of losing their OS validation). The Chinese internet is currently in a transitional period, with many established sites still working only with older versions of Trident, while newer sites (particularly mobile sites, and particuarly those targeted at the middle- and upper-class) support modern engines. Such dual-engine browsers help to ease that transition.

A bunch of games use webkit for in game UI. Many of them run on windows.

I think quite a few use Webkit directly but there are some middle-ware libraries for the purpose. Awesomium I belive is reasonably frequently used. Their website says that it uses "Chromium/WebKit" though so I suppose that they may be moving to Blink as well.

The Steam overlay uses WebKit, as well as every Source game that renders HTML.

Valve's Steam gaming platform uses Webkit to render their Store and have a 40-million strong userbase at most recent count http://gamespot.com/news/steam-crosses-40-million-users-6348...

Steam doesn't use bare WebKit but Chromium, presuming they stay up to date (my install registers as Chromium 18, so doubtful) and don't switch, they'll be running Blink instead.

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Chromium_Embedded_F...

(Unrelated: their embedded Chromium seems to be hard-coded to Windows-like shortcuts; even in the address bar)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com