One of my favorite aspects of Mike Lazaridis’ keynote today at Mobile World Congress 2010 was the preview of our upcoming WebKit browser. We have been talking about the upcoming WebKit browser since Jim Balsillie announced it at the BlackBerry Developer Conference in November, so being able to share it with you – the developer community – feels great.
For everyone who wasn’t able to attend today, we’ve embedded the WebKit demo video above for your viewing pleasure. As you can see in the video, we’ve adapted WebKit to take advantage of the incredible efficiency of the BlackBerry platform and it shows. With the new browser, pages load quickly and dynamic markup like Javascript and AJAX are fast and responsive. With improved panning and zooming it creates a seamless end user experience. The video showcases how the new browser delivers the web with full fidelity on your BlackBerry smartphone. All of this comes with full standards interoperability as shown by the 100/100 score on the ACID3 test.
As part of his App Planet keynote, Mr. Lazaridis also showcased some of the upcoming capabilities that will be supported by the new browser including:
- HTML 5
- CSS3
- DOM L3
Not only will the new browser support all of these web technologies but we are excited to confirm that it will also support two Widget standards – BlackBerry Widgets and JIL Widgets.
This substantial step forward with WebKit and our platform efficiency will enable content developers to create robust applications for both the Web and Widget development models. This browser will deliver a compelling and powerful application experience for your users.
