April 14, 2010 by Andre Jackson
Last week Apple revealed an early test version of its WebKit2 rendering engine, more an update than an all new service, WebKit2 will add process management technology to WebKit based browsers and applications.
This new approach from Apple, named a ‘split process model’ or ‘process isolation’ has already been used by Google in their WebKit based Chrome browser.
Apple have stated that WebKit2 was designed with the purpose of improving robustness, security and responsiveness and to use the capabilities of the more common multi-core chips appearing in computers more efficiently.
The new technology will isolate the user interface and the application logic in a completely different process from the web content. This will then make it easier to isolate crashes or to create a sort of security sandbox around the web content.
Other techniques that Apple have introduced in WebKit2 include notification style client callbacks, policy settings, injected code and policy style client callbacks.
The release last week was only a technology demo, it will apparently be significantly different on its full release. Apple said it would release a basic web browser suitable for testing WebKit2 in the near future as the current download of it will not work on the Safari browser.
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