This past Summer, the news broke that the KDE project has plans to re-merge KHTML and Webkit. It appears the KHTML team is not going gently into that good night.

WebKit is a lightweight yet powerful rendering engine that emerged out of KHTML in 2001. Its flexibility, performance and thoughtful design made it the obvious choice for Chromium's rendering engine back when we started. Thanks to the hard work by all in the community, WebKit has thrived and kept pace with the web platform’s growing capabilities since then.

The GTK+ port of WebKit is the first open source HTML render to fully pass the Acid3 test on the Linux platform. WebKit, which is Apple's increasingly popular fork of KDE's KHTML rendering engine, is used by Apple's Safari web browser and the iPhone.

Since the original fork from KHTML, a lot of water as passed under the bridge of webkit development, to the point that as of today, webkit based browsers thrive all over linux land.

The open-source WebKit HTML rendering engine is rapidly gaining ground on the Linux platform where it is increasingly being adopted by conventional desktop applications for content display. Ongoing efforts to facilitate tighter WebKit integration are opening the door for developing rich Internet applications on Linux with the open-source GTK and Qt development toolkits.

The GTK port of the WebKit HTML rendering engine has gained support for the HTML5 video element. The media backend, which uses GStreamer, was implemented by Pierre-Luc Beaudoin of Collabora. Developer Alp Toker integrated the backend with GTk/WebKit's Cairo graphics pipeline, making it possible for the video content to be embedded in SVG and manipulated with CSS and JavaScript.

At the moment, I have mixed feelings. Not about writing blogs. Not about working on WebKit. But about using the new WebKit browser to write the blog entry, haha! I've seen it crash, although in the last days, it has become pretty stable.

GNOME's Epiphany web browser recently gained support for rendering HTML with WebKit. The patch for WebKit support in Epiphany—which was experimentally implemented at the GNOME GUADEC conference—is now available for testing.

In the wake of Google's release of the new WebKit-based Chrome browser, some technology enthusiasts are beginning to wonder if the days are numbered for Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine.