BlackBerry WebKit Browser Preview at Mobile World Congress!

02.16.10 Mike

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.

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  • Still waiting...
  • Pretty cool, I love how developers are getting involved and are creating third party apps for the device.
  • Hanson Williams
    You screwed it up bigtime. Once again, Blackberry, in its stupidity, messed with a good thing and changed the WebKit delivery so that it displays a "Blackberryized" version of a web page. Unbelievably stupid on their part.

    The WebKit is designed to be a small window into a larger display, and RIM has decided that the way every other smartphone uses the WebKit is not good enough for their precious and continually out of date BB. So, in keeping with their company policy of always being behind the leaders, they decided to rework all web pages so that they would fit the BB screen.

    How disappointing and stupid.
  • Seem nice.
    When will it be available?
  • dan
    any date when will be up??
  • browserdefault
    Looks like very powerful. Will try it when it is available.
  • Larry K
    Congratulations on your preview! Having been there (other products/companies), I know how hard your engineering staff has been working to get to the preview stage.

    Will the sw include support for Client-side storage (window.database)? How about Offline Application cache (Manifest files). Both of those features are supported on today's iPhones, iPads, and Android systems.

    I very much hope so....
  • Any tentative date of release?
  • The video was much convincing.. I guess it might be out soon
  • Black Berry
    Will this be available for "older" Blackberry devices (like the 8800 or the Bold 9000).
  • Tony
    Stop teasing us and post a beta!!!! Even alpha quality code that actually renders pages would be...well useful unlike the current browser.
  • LL
    How does this look on the Storm?
  • David McCormack
    The support for JIL widgets is very good news indeed. Unfortunately though, the developer resources at www.jil.org are very poor quality. The documentation is incomplete and self-contradictory, and the emulator is so slow that it is effectively useless for any kind of serious work. I started developing a widget for JIL a few months ago but had to abandon in favour of the BB Widget spec instead. Does RIM have any plans to provide their own documentation and emulator for the JIL Widget spec?

    I'd also like to second the question from Amir regarding the OS versions for which the new browser will be available. If it will only be available in the context of an OS upgrade then this will mean that a great many BB users will never have the new browser.
  • this sounds so exciting! when will this be available?!
  • 100/100 on Acid3 plus HTML5 is awesome

    pan/zoom speed looks much improved as well
  • lou
    I can not see the video , please check it.
  • So when will this browser be available? Can it be implemented to any version of BlackBerry OS?
  • BlackBerry
    Private Video. Don't post if public cannot view.
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