Another gem from planet gnome. WebKit GTK and QT are finally getting pluggin support (follow the link for screenshot bling). WebKit is fast becoming the little browser engine that could. I’m looking forward to seeing the GTK and QT pushes bring on an age that gets us native Win32 WebKit. I can think of tonnes of projects where I needed a light weight, easy to embed browser engine and instead resort to IE shell hacks.
May 2nd, 2008 at 9:24 am
er, there already is a native Win32 back-end of WebKit?
May 2nd, 2008 at 10:10 am
Well I may be wrong, but I haven’t seen a viable, actively developed win32 port of WebKit recently.
I may not be looking in the right places, but I’d be happy to change my views if you have a decent link. Even searching for http://google.com/search?q=win32%20webkit doesn’t seem to bring up a specific coherent project for it.
May 2nd, 2008 at 10:39 am
It’s maintained upstream - http://svn.webkit.org/repository/webkit/trunk/ - Have a look in WebKit/win - how well it works, I don’t know, but probably as well as the gtk backend, minus the plugin support
May 2nd, 2008 at 11:55 am
Do you need something that is only win32 or can it use Qt or Gtk on Windows? At least the Qt port on Windows is doing really well. Qt 4.4 includes a demo browser that you can play around with and look through the source. With a nice simple API (that isn’t going to change) embedding WebKit with Qt on windows is easy. If you google for Qt demo browser you should get a bunch of hits.
May 3rd, 2008 at 1:06 pm
In my experience, when looking to embed a html engine in a windows app adding a dependency on gtk+ is not a good idea. There are many, many cool windows gtk+ apps (I’ve used pidgin for a long time), but each one comes with it’s own shipped version of gtk+ sometimes causing conflicts. A native win32 port also has the benefit of using native widgets in the form elements that will obey the user’s desktop theme.