img#kde {float:right; margin:0 0 .5em .5em; border:1px solid #666;} div#kdeintro ul {margin-bottom:.7em;} /* Site Header */ #hd { padding: 25px 20px 20px; } #hd .site-header { display: flex; align-items: center; } #hd .site-brand { display: flex; align-items: center; gap: 20px; } #hd .site-logo img { height: 52px; width: auto; } #hd .site-title { margin: 0; font-size: 32px; color: #30418C; line-height: 1.2; letter-spacing: normal; } #hd .site-title a { color: inherit; text-decoration: none; } #hd .site-tagline { margin: 5px 0 0; font-size: 15px; color: #666; letter-spacing: normal; }

On Friday, Lars Knoll and George Staikos from the KHTML project visited Yahoo! to give a talk on the history of KHTML and Konqueror and the connection between those projects and Apple's open-source WebKit (which was built upon KHTML and announced in January of 2003 as the foundation of Apple's Safari browser). We learned a great deal about this decade-long project, including remarkable tidbits such as:

• KHTML was the first non-IE browser engine to support languages whose writing does not run left-to-right;
• WebKit has been selected by Adobe to power the rendering engine in the Apollo project
• Konqueror developers are considering implementing WebKit as the rendering engine for the next version of Konqueror, replacing KHTML (this would, as George points out, provide more of a bug-for-bug compatibility between Safari and Konqueror).

Lars took us through the early history of the project and George through the current landscape. The outlook for WebKit is bright, with Apple having done a great deal of work and the KDE, WebKit, and Konqueror communities strong and active.

YUI engineer Nate Koechley brought a camera along for the presentation, and although the video is rough we're continuing our policy of making this kind of content available as broadly as we can. If you're interested in the current state of KHTML/WebKit, we think you'll find the presentation interesting. Thanks particularly to Lars and George for the visit and for letting us share the video publicly.

Video (26 min.):

This video can be viewed using the embedded player above or directly on Yahoo! Video.

Note to Yahoo! Video users: Thanks largely to user feedback, the Yahoo! Video team has reconfigured its player from a streaming mode to a progressive mode. That means that you can go to the clip's Yahoo! Video page, pause the movie, and let the whole file download before beginning to watch — reducing the occurrence of buffering interruptions. The embedded player continues to use the streaming mode, so if you're having trouble with any YUI videos using the embedded player try visiting the Yahoo Video site directly...and keep sending them feedback if you have any issues at all.

More videos about YUI and frontend engineering can be found in the YUI Theater.