Nokia Opens Browser Source Code

On the heels of Motorola’s open source for mobile plans, Nokia has announced its own open source project with the release of its S60 WebKit, the engine for the Web browser that comes with the S60 line of phones.

Nokia’s goal for the project is to make WebKit easier to port to different mobile platforms and reduce fragmentation between different browser implementations. The S60 platform itself is not being released since it is built on the Symbian OS.

“In today’s mobility we’re talking about 10 different browsers — all of them with their own engines and different levels of content support, even in terms of HTML support,” Lee Epting, vice president of Forum Nokia, told internetnews.com.

The source code is released under the BSD license, one of the more relaxed open source licenses with few restrictions. The code is available through the WebKit Open Source Project.

Nokia recently released the S60 Web browser, which supports Ajax and therefore JavaScript and DHTML.

The S60 browser is based on the Webcore and JavaScriptCore technologies from Apple’s Safari browser. In addition to the browser, Nokia is offering the memory manager, frames, reference UI and Web page layout engine technologies as open code.