In a bid to encourage the mobile phone industry to standardize on a single Web browser, Nokia on Wednesday released the source code for the mobile phone Web browser it developed last year.
Nokia designed the browser for its S60 line of phones using the same open source frameworks used by Apple Computer for its Safari browser, and adding enhancements designed to improve mobile browsing. Any mobile phone maker or operator can now access the engine that runs the Nokia-developed browser and customize it for their own needs.
"We want to reduce the fragmentation currently in place in mobile browsing," said Lee Epting, vice president of Forum Nokia, Nokia's software development support program.
She doesn't expect the fact that this browser comes from Nokia to discourage Nokia competitors from using it. "It would be one thing if it was under proprietary licensing terms," she said. But Nokia is releasing the code as a BSD License, which she describes as a liberal license that enables anyone to use the code to develop a commercial offering. Developers can find the code through the WebKit Open Source Project.
Opera Software's chief technology officer, however, doesn't expect Nokia's move to have much of an impact. "It has limited value for the open source community," said Hakon Lie, CTO for Opera. The amount of code that Nokia released is relatively small compared to the amount it kept proprietary and the innovations Nokia has made are unlikely to be useful to developers of mobile phone platforms other than S60, he said.
