In the recent pre-release of Qt for S60 we have included a build of WebKit that compiles and runs on S60. This pre-release is an important milestone for this porting effort that started about half a year ago. Hence, I would like to briefly highlight a few things about it:
The main work is finding good solutions for quirks in the toolchain. That includes the ARM RVCT compiler and the Metrowerks compiler used by the emulator on Windows, both with their own unique set of challenges.
The team working on this consists of Norbert Leser and Laszlo Gombos from the Nokia Browser Team in Boston as well as Janne Koskinen from Digia and Kristian Amlie from the QtSoftware Team here in Oslo. In addition Ariya wrote the little but super-cool anomaly demo browser, which is included in the Qt/S60 Tower release. The port is still in early stages, but it’s looking quite good already and rather performant.
We’ve been maintaining the patches in separate repositories and we’ve been pushing patches in small steps upstream for a few months now. There’s still a lot to go, but things are progressing. And the result is looking really cool 
6 Responses to “Port of QtWebKit to S60”
I love that N97…
Still trying to convince my boss to give me one
I installed the packages on my Nokia E51. Installation was successful and I can start the demo application. The cover flip navigation works great, but the demo applications itself do not work properly. It seems that they are only for devices with a touch screen, which the E51 is not. Will the applications and QT on S60 support devices without touch screen too?
Greetings,
Chris
@Chris: Keypad navigation is a feature that we want to have in Qt on non-touch devices. With the current pre-release, some of the demos (and other QWidget based apps) are supposed to be a bit more usable also with non-touch devices. But there are still issues preventing proper usage. We work on it.
…Congratulations to the QWebkit to S60 porting team! I am really impressed by how the (very slick & lean) Anomaly demo browser runs so well on my Tube, although not many S60 specific performance adjustments have been done, yet. And the best thing is that Qt brings the latest Webkit (~10 days old sources?) to S60. Qt rocks! (as if we all didn’t know that).
I started my testing of QtS60 today and my main interest was the browser indeed.
And, indeed, I was really really impressed, particularly comparing it with the c**p that S60WebKit is.
I’m happy particularly because:
- it offers performance that I find comparable to WebKit on Android (iPhone and Palm Pre are still far)
- it renders really well
- I found relatively complex Javascript code/animations working pretty well
I also read the official whitepaper about Qt Webkit and I was interested to know which one of the following features are going to be in QtWeb for S60 as well:
- Acid 3 compliancy
- HTML5
- Javascript extensibility through “object tag” AND “QObjects”
- DB storage
- …
Anyway, keep going with the good work guys: I really like the result and I’m looking forward to build great things with Qt on S60.
Great to know that QtWebKit now i am waiting for QtDBus.
This new release of Qt for S60 is a nice improvement over the Garden release. It’s good to see that.
The browser is still a tad buggy (not way to input text in the text boxes on the web sites, the url/search doesn’t always show the keypad, etc) and performance is still an issue. But at the rate of this development I’m sure the final version will be a great one.
The improved SDK integration is very nice. It’s got me already hacking my test apps