“Welcome to GetWebKit, the home of the first and only WebKit based Windows web browser. Featuring the excellent rendering engine used in popular Macintosh web browsers Safari and Shiira, GetWebKit offers a free, powerful, and open-source internet experience.” Seems like besides Opera, IE, and Gecko, there is now a 4th mature engine coming to the Windows platform.
Too many Windows users stick with buggy old end-of-lifed IE from sheer intertia. Maybe this will help.
Too many Windows users simply do not know there is a viable alternative. Heck, most Windows users don’t want to know.
They don’t know there’s an alternative to Windows. Many that know macs exist don’t trust something different, aren’t sure it will work right – can they do everything they can already do? Do they need to learn something new?
IE IS the internet for most. If they don’t know what a web browser is or does, or that there are alternatives that are better, how do you expect them to know where to go, install, and use it?
The problem isn’t intertia itself – the problem is ignorance.
It would probably help if Windows had drag-and-drop application installation, but don’t hold your breath….
“It would probably help if Windows had drag-and-drop application installation, but don’t hold your breath….”
Easily done with .Net applications, provided it doesn’t need to access the registry.
application can mostly be designed like that but some shared library are considered common enough among dev.
static linking is nice and fast but is not considered as disk space wise. Plus an OS panel for install/uninstall is quite common and useful when wisely designed ( see : package manager in most linux distros ).
dotNet doesn’t solve the problem but help with the commonly known ‘dll nightmare’ where shared library version are overwritten by older version
What about the engine found in Konqueror? Doesn’t this one make it five?
Well, “coming to the Windows platform” was specified, and as far as I know, there are no KHTML-based browsers built for Windows. I suppose Konqueror itself could be run via Cygwin, and KDE4 has plans for Windows support, but that’s all not quite the same…
Besides, are WebKit and KHTML not effectively the same (particularly with Unity and all)?
well, konqi is only usable atm by using cygwin. also, khtml is not webkit, apple forked khtml. for KDE 4 there is the Unity project which might bring both trees back in sync, and KDE 4 apps will run on windows and Mac OS X, so in 6 or 7 months we might see konqi using webkit on windows. but GetWebKit was first, then 😉
The site is pretty sparse on information. The online subversion repository is empty, the link to the forums times out, and the main page has absolutely no information about who is involved in this project or any of the other information one might expect to find on a project page.
Also, although on the website the browser is always just referred to as “WebKit”, the installer calls it “Swift” everywhere.
The whole thing makes me kind of wary of installing it.. Has anyone confirmed that this is for real?
PS. Rcsteiner: Konqueror doesn’t run on windows yet (cygwin and X11 doesn’t count for most users). However, it hopefully will around the time that KDE4 is released.
Has anyone confirmed that this is for real?
I’ll upload a screenshot once the WWDC keynote is over, okay? Works fine here.
Being the reckless sort that I am, I installed it on my WinXP box. The installer stopped with “Module C:Program FilesSwift TeamSwiftinWebKit.dll failed to register. HRESULT -2147010895. Contact your support personnel.” This error dialog had the options of Exit Installation, Try Again or Continue. I chose to continue, and the installer finished up. The program wouldn’t start however, saying something about an incorrect application configuration.
This sounds like an installer error more than anything else. I doubt it installed any malware; my antivirus and spyware/malware scanners aren’t getting any hits. That being said, proceed with caution.
That’s error code 0x800736B1, a library manifest problem. Make sure you have the Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable installed first – you can download it from
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=32BC1BEE-A…
I had the same error. Following your advice I was able to install it and use it.
Glad to help. If you have the time, you may want to notify the Swift developers about the problem and the fix.
Wait a second. Would that be a dependency issue? On windows? Clicking “next” didn’t just work? Maybe yum, apt, portage, conary, ports, pkg_add or something similar would have helped.
Feel free to mod me how you like. I couldn’t help myself.
Now if the author forgot to include the DLL in the installer, what is the difference if he forgets to add the dependency to the library in a package (and he would have forgotten it, as we see)? None.
In both cases that file would be missing.
Dependency handling is non-trivial on any operating system, but it’s the responsibility of the package maintainer. Not wanting to defend any particular OS or anything, but in this case the fault lies smack with the developers since they forgot to include the merge module for the VC2005 runtime in the setup.
Ok, well I bit the bullet and installed it and it is actually what it claims
Naturally, the browser is very very basic still, but I didn’t see any problems in the rendering so far and no crashes. Unfortunately I couldn’t post this comment from Swift, since the password field for OSNews doesn’t appear.
Here’s a screenshot:
http://www.mushroomstamp.ca/swift.png
Wow, stealing KHTML and using an opera interface, innovative, just kidding, the tabs on top are the best position, I hope Konqi gets that right one day. For the rest I don’t understand why they just try to help porting Konqueror to windows, it’s gonna be done anyway and the project is pretty much a bit more mature, and they’re going to sync with webkit again and going further together (under the name: Unity). But well, if it’s for fun why not ;-), good luck with it I’d say.
For the most part, the HTML code itself renders good. I haven’t tried breaking it with CSS yet.
Maybe once it’s more than a container with Webkit stuck into it it will be usable.
I would rather see GetWebkit develop it as a control that can be embedded from the ground up…just like the IE Control and Mozilla Control. Sure, ActiveX is bad for the Internet, but it’s useful for RAD.
That would also be good to create a plugin for Firefox similar to IE Tab so developers can test sites in Webkit, IE, and Gecko without leaving Firefox.
Furthermore I think they should use the Crystal Icon set for Swift, it would just feel right.
It’s a good start no doubt, but don’t download it unless you are into alpha-grade software.
Well, it is really maybe an alpha stage. It’s the first release you see there. I know that, I’m an official translator.
The password boxes not showing up is a bug the developpers currently did not fix, it is not only on osnews, but everywhere. There will soon be a workaround using normal inputs instead of password boxes, and as soon that they rule that bug, they will be set back as password boxes.
[EDIT] I do not know exactly if this browser should have it the news at this stage, but I hope you won’t make your mind only on that (buggy) first public build
Edited 2006-08-07 18:02
The OSS community needs a good alternative to Gecko, and this could be it. Unfortunately, everyone working on a new browser for *nix seems to be dead set on using 30-odd megabytes of slow, poorly maintained bloat (otherwise known as xulrunner) to power their software. I really, really hope that someone out there, someone in Gnome or XFCE development or an independent programmer or whatever, looks at Webkit and says, “Hey, this looks useful. Maybe I should base my browser on it, and actually stick with it instead of abandoning the thing after a month.”
Why do you dismiss KHTML ? Konqueror is a very good browser, and is free.
You’re kidding, right?
They’re ALL free, and all of them have their various strengths and weaknesses…. Konqis forte seems to be bloated code…
You’re kidding, right?
KHTML is eveything but bloated. Some thinks that Konqueror, the interface for KDE that uses KHTML, is bloated (whatever that means), but it is a pleasure to use. Isn’t that more important ?
Konqis forte seems to be bloated code…
Dude, what are you talking about?
First off, Konqui is simply a shell wrapper for khtml.
Khtml was chosen by Apple over Gecko specifically because it was smaller, leaner and more efficient code.
From Apple at the time:
“When we were evaluating technologies over a year ago, KHTML and KJS stood out,” Safari Engineering Manager Don Melton wrote. (KJS is KDE’s JavaScript interpreter.) “Not only were they the basis of an excellent, modern and standards-compliant Web browser, they were also less than 140,000 lines of code. The size of your code and ease of development within that code made it a better choice for us than other open-source projects.”
And Mozilla’s response to that?
“I guess I’m supposed to be mortally offended–or at least embarrassed–that they went with KHTML instead of our Gecko engine, but I’m having trouble working up the indignation,” wrote Mike Shaver in a Web log posting. “We’ve all known forever that Gecko missed its ‘small-and-lean’ target by an area code, and we’ve been slogging back towards the goal, dragging our profilers and benchmarks behind us, for years.”
Shaver, who left Netscape three years ago but retained his position on the small Mozilla staff, said that in Apple’s shoes he might have made a similar decision.
“If I had to write a new browser, and I was going to have to touch the layout code in a serious way, I would think about Mozilla alternatives,” Shaver wrote. “I really, really hope that Mozilla will learn from Safari/KHTML, because they’ve done a lot of great work in about a tenth of the code.”
It’s also worth noting that the Safari team had roots in Mozilla, yet selected khtml anyways.
(source: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-980492.html)
If you want to argue the merits of various browsers, that’s fine, but please, explain again exactly how Konq/khtml suffers from “bloated code”? Compared to what, exactly? Lynx, maybe?
Haven’t you heard? Everything in KDE is bloated. Your fancy quotes, facts, and reasoning doesn’t make any sense, because it is obviously wrong.
</sarcasm off>
Clearly the poster was just complaining that Konqueror has too many buttons. And he has a point, although the simple mode that Kubuntu defaults to isn’t that bad. What people don’t realize is that a gui has almost no impact on how bloated an html engine like khtml is.
Interesting…
Does this mean that Windows-based web developers and designers can now test Safari rendering without Mac OS?
Is there anything like this for Linux?
Edited 2006-08-08 00:42
“Is there anything like this for Linux?”
Yes, http://www.konqueror.org/
Yeah, I guess that slipped my mind. But is the css and javascript rendering of KHTML vs Webkit really close enough?
Hmmmm, anyone know why Swift is so big? (15MB) Debug code or something?
To loudly trumpet a “new” browser and praise WebKit without once mentioning KHTML is just plain unkind. Give credit where credit is due: Yes, WebKit is somewhat enhanced by Apple, but without KHTML it’s just a collection of patches.
Yall may now get sources, you need alteast Visual Studio 2005 Standard and a compiled WebKit .tlb from http://webkit.opendarwin.org See the OpenDarwin Wiki on how to build WebKit for Windows.