The WebKit team have announced WebKit2 is on it’s way, the popular rendering engine found in Apple’s Safari, and Google’s Chrome web browsers.

“WebKit2 is designed from the ground up to support a split process model, where the web content (JavaScript, HTML, layout, etc) lives in a separate process” wrote Anders Carlsson and Sam Weinig. This is similar to what the Chrome team have done, but it allows other developers to use this model right from the framework without having to add an extra application layer.

WebKit2 can currently be compiled for both Mac OSX and Windows users. More information can be found in the WebKit wiki.

No word yet on when this will make its way into the Safari browser, of if Google will be interested in this method over it’s own for Chrome.

Research In Motion (RIM) – the creators of the popular BlackBerry Phone – have announced at this weeks Mobile World Congress that they will release a WebKit based browser for its range of phones.

WebKit is the popular rendering engine found powering Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome browsers.

A demonstration of an early build on a BlackBerry devices showed real promise, with fast rendering speeds and scoring a perfect 100/100 in the Acid3 test.

No news of when to expect the new browser, but we will let you know when we have more information.

A video demonstration of the browser in action can be seen after the break.

Read more

Nightly Mac builds of WebKit, the basis of which Safari and Google Chrome are built on, now include 3D CSS transforms.

3D CSS transforms allow web developers to manipulate objects in the third dimension with simple CSS rules. Current CSS3 standards do not include these 3D transforms, but Apple has submitted 3D CSS transforms to the W3C for consideration as an official CSS standard.

The 3D transforms are already available in iPhone OS 2.0 and up.

Users or developers wanting to check out this new feature can download the latest nightly build from WebKit. The following 3D transform demos are available:

• Charles Ying’s Snow Stack photo browser
• Peter Zich’s 3D Van “model” rotating in space
• Peter Zich’s 3D Image Fly, another image browser (hint: click and drag to rotate)

Rumors have been circulating that the next version of Internet Explorer could possibly use Apple’s open source WebKit rendering engine.

It appears, as expected, that these rumors were indeed false.

Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer put to rest any speculation that IE9 would use WebKit. He also told Ars Technica that IE8 would not be the last version of IE.

That solves that mystery.

The latest nightly build of WebKit now includes support for CSS animations. WebKit is the rendering engine used by many browsers, including Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome browser.

Dean Jacksons explains the benefits of CSS animations:

CSS Animations is one of the enhancements to CSS proposed by the WebKit project that we’ve been calling CSS Effects (eg. gradients, masks, transitions). The goal is to provide properties that allow Web developers to create graphically rich content. In many cases animations are presentational, and therefore belong in the styling system. This allows developers to write declarative rules for animations, replacing lots of hard-to-maintain animation code in JavaScript.

The new effects are already implemented in the iPhone and iPod touch browsers, and should make their way in to releases of Safari and Chrome shortly. In the mean time, you can test the new CSS animations by downloding the latest nightly release of WebKit.

Google has released a pre-beta release to its dev channel allowing developers to take a look at new features packed into Google Chrome.

With a version number of 2.0.156.1, the release includes a new version of WebKit, autocomplete for forms, and an updated spell checker.

This release also brings Google closer to bringing Chrome to Mac and Linux, with its own version of the HTTP protocol. In previous releases Google has been using WinHTTP library, tying the browser to Windows only.

Google is yet to announce a release date for the final version of Chrome 2.0.

Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, has considered moving Internet Explorer’s core over to the open source WebKit rendering engine.

It appers the move is being considered as a way to stem the bleeding of users to other web browsers, who are looking for more complete and compliant web browsers.

Market Share by Net Applications shows that for October, IE’s market share has dropped to 71%.

With IE8 set for release in early 2009, changes of this magnitude would likely not be seen for another 2 years, in what could possible be IE9.

This move, if true, would be fantastic news for users and web developers everywhere.

WebKit passing Acid3

The WebKit development team has just passed another huge milestone. The WebKit browser engine used in Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome now fully passes the Acid3 test.

The Acid3 test checks how well browsers comply with the latest standards, in particular JavaScript and the Document Object Model (DOM).

Maciej Stachowiak of the WebKit team attributes this feat to “recent speedups in JavaScript, DOM and rendering.”

Unfortunately, it will be a few months before we see this in Safari and Chrome, but while you wait you can download a nightly build of WebKit and test this for yourself.