ABrowse is a web browser for the Syllable operating system. Like Apple?s Safari web browser, it uses the WebKit layout engine.

History

ABrowse was originally written for AtheOS and used a port of KDE 2?s KHTML and was first released in early August 2001.^[1] ABrowse?s inception and port of KHTML were performed by Kurt Skauen for his now-defunct AtheOS project. The port of KHTML communicated with the operating system?s GUI?s widget toolkit via a wrapper for the Qt toolkit.

In December 2004, Syllable developer Arno Klenke ported ABrowse to a KDE 3 version of KHTML.^[2]

Due to difficulties with the amount of work required to maintain current ports of KHTML on Syllable, other layout engines such as Gecko have been discussed, but Arno Klenke has kept the KHTML port up-to-date in the meantime. Furthermore, while KHTML, a slimmer engine than Gecko, is made in pure C++, allowing it to be painlessly ported with a Qt wrapper to Syllable (which is also constructed in pure C++), Gecko is constructed with a larger, more diverse codebase, thus making a future port of Gecko a far more time- and code-intensive effort.^[3]

Since the release of Syllable 0.6.4 in July 2007, ABrowse is based on WebKit.^[4][5]

Other projects with that name

aBrowse is also the name for a web-based anonymous proxy.

See also

• List of web browsers
• Comparison of web browsers

References

1. ↑ OSNews: AtheOS 0.3.5 Released With KHTML Support (August 13, 2001)
2. ↑ Syllyble December 2004 Newsletter: ABrowse 0.4 alpha
3. ↑ OSNews: Syllable Team Marches On (Comments section) (July 28, 2002)
4. ↑ Syllable: New build, new ABrowse (July 1, 2007)
5. ↑ Syllable: Syllable 0.6.4 released (July 16, 2007)