Despite having released the iPad a week ago, and a beta of the new iPhone OS hours ago, Apple still hasn’t stopped pumping out the announcements. Just earlier, the team who work on the WebKit framework announced that they will soon be releasing patches for a framework that they refer to as “WebKit2″, bringing some nice new changes.
The announcement, made rather informally here, reveals that the next version of WebKit will be utilizing a split process model, where the components of any given website (such as HTML, CSS, etc) will be processed separately. This model is apparently similar to what Google offers with its Chrome browser, except with WebKit, the difference is that the split process model is built directly into the framework, allowing other clients of WebKit to take advantage of it. This sounds like a lot to digest for those who aren’t familiar with this sort of stuff, and it is, but it’ll lead to a better user experience in the near future.
The reason that this is a big deal is because so many clients use the WebKit rendering engine for browsing the web, including Google’s Chrome itself. It’s also a big player in the mobile browsing market, so this’ll lead to mobile browsers with increased stability in the future. Basic documentation can be found here, though there’s no word on when the final version of the new updates will be pushed out, aside from “soon.” Either way, developers & web developers alike, keep your eyes peeled as you’ll probably be pretty interested in this. Also, keep in mind that this is only available on Mac and Windows currently.
