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January 8, 2008
Porting a browser
Porting a browser: This report of a Mobile Monday presentation has been kicking around the republishers today. This line bothered me: "Wake3 plans a public beta release of WebKit for Windows Mobile in a few months. It will have full support for JavaScript, but Adobe Flash support is not expected. 'You pretty much need a license,' from Adobe, said Zucker. Instead, Wave3 will support technologies like SVG." Three points: (1) Adobe Flash Lite for Windows Mobile can be freely downloaded, and it costs nothing to use. This download is intended for developers, though, and consumers should have functionality included at time of manufacture -- Adobe is not assuming support costs for each and every device profile out there. That "you need a license" statement was, at best, ambiguous. (2) If you're porting a browser, you don't do anything fancy "for Flash support"... you just include the extension mechanisms all browsers already include. The speaker might be intending to say "we don't want to port the plugin-hosting code", which seems a strange decision. (3) The phrase "SVG support" is always bizarre, because it implies a binary condition when realworld SVG implementations are always in varying shades of grey -- at best, the speaker could be intending to say "We'll render some parts of some SVG spec in some way". It's their decision on which to work, but for talking about that work, we need to meet in the middle.
Posted by JohnDowdell at January 8, 2008 5:25 PM