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Nokia Opens Browser Code To Developers

Nokia plans Wednesday to release the source code for its S60 WebKit, the engine for its S60 mobile phone Web browser, to the open-source development community. In doing so, Nokia is trying to unify mobile browser developers on a common platform.

Lee Epting, VP of Nokia's global software developer support program, Forum Nokia, calls the move "the clearest path to reduce fragmentation in the mobile browser market." She adds, "If developers have to support 10 different browsers across multiple devices and operating systems, it's a problem."

On a suitably modern phone, the S60 mobile browser has the advantage of being able to render Web pages as they appear to PC users, albeit smaller. It isn't forced to rely on specially designed mobile-friendly pages. Competing browsers like Opera Mobile can do this, too.

But Nokia claims to do it better. "The goal of many mobile Web browsers is to deliver standard Web pages accurately and completely, but none of them meet this objective as fully as the S60 browser," a company spokesperson said in an e-mail.

The S60 WebKit browser engine is based on the WebCore and JavaScriptCore components of Apple's Safari browser, which itself is based on KDE's KHTML engine. Companies that currently build phones based on the S60 platform, which runs on the Symbian OS, include Lenovo, Nokia, Panasonic, Samsung, and Siemens.

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