[webkit-dev] Greetings from the Series 60 mobile browser team at Nokia

[roland.geisler at nokia.com]

This email contains email addresses in the cc of the Nokia browser developers as mentioned below.

RE: Recent press release: http://press.nokia.com/PR/200506/998214_5.html

Hi,

I'm heading marketing and strategy at Nokia for Series 60's new mobile browser that will be built upon WebCore/KHTML and JavaScriptCore/KJS. I am writing you this email to thank you for having built the Konqueror and Safari browser with the two components WebCore/KHTML and JavaScriptCore/KJS. I would like to introduce myself and some members from our core development team, and explain why we at Nokia have selected your code base for our future Series 60 mobile browser. I also hope that this will start a mutual dialogue among us that will support all of our projects in the future.

Not all of you might be familiar with Series 60. Series 60 is a smart phone software platform developed by Nokia, which enables feature rich applications on mobile devices. Series 60 is based on the Symbian OS and is written in C++. More information can be found from http://www.forum.nokia.com
and http://www.series60.com/.

I copied some of our core development team members on this email so you have their names and contact information. Antti Koivisto, whom you might know already, is one of the co-authors of KHTML and has been working for Nokia Research Center for the past few years and recently joined our mobile browser development team in Boston. David Carson and Deepika Chauhan are two of the original developers of the Nokia mobile browser. Zalan Bujtas, Prabhakar Marnadi, Yongjun Zhang and Sachin Padma have been working with mobile browsers for some years at Nokia in Helsinki and Boston. Keith Hollis has several years experience working with mobile browsers and has recently joined our team in Boston, earlier he was the principal person leading the port of the Opera web browser to the Symbian OS at Opera Software. Guido Grassel, Kimmo Kinnunen and Andrei Popescu are working at our Nokia Research Center in Helsinki (http://www.nokia.com/research/) where we have built the GTK port of Apple's WebCore that we released last year - http://gtk-webcore.sourceforge.net/.

The high performance, low memory consumption and small code footprint of KHTML and KJS make these components ideal for resource-constrained mobile devices. Clean architecture and good design create a good base for future development of mobile features. In addition, Web compliance was another important criteria for us. Congratulations to the KDE Konqueror developer team for building such a great browser.

Big thanks at this point also go to the Apple Safari team that has tremendously improved KHTML and KJS in many areas, in particular in Web compliance and performance.  WebCore and JavaScriptCore also offer a cleaner separation to the underlying operating system. For these reasons we at Nokia chose WebCore and JavaScriptCore as the code base for our Series 60 mobile browser.

Our plan is that the new Series 60 mobile browser will be available as a standard Series 60 application during the first half of 2006. 

We at Nokia are excited to use WebCore/KHTML and JavaScriptCore/KJS for our future Series 60 mobile browser. I hope that we can start a dialogue with your community and the Apple Safari team on how to "mobilize" WebCore/KHTML and JavaScriptCore/KJS to create the best Web browser based on open-source components for mobile devices. 

Best regards,

Roland Geisler
Head of Marketing & Strategy, Series 60 Browser
Nokia

PS: Please forward this email to any contributor whom I may have missed.