Jolla open sources the Sailfish OS browser

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I continue to be impressed by the commitment that Jolla is making to the Sailfish OS platform and hardware. That continues this week with the open sourcing of their web browser application:

By now it’s a widely known fact that the browser is based on the Gecko engine which is developed by Mozilla corp. and is used in their Firefox browser and Firefox OS. For some reason it’s not that known that the Sailfish browser is built upon the EmbedLite embedding API (also known as IPCLiteAPI) for Gecko.

This embedding API started as a research project in Nokia by Oleg Romashin and Andrey Petrov at the times when Nokia was still developing the Maemo platform. Currently the project is maintained by Tatiana Meshkova.

It would help us a lot if the API made its way to the main Gecko repository and became a part of the engine.

I’ve moved one of my regular SIM cards into the Jolla handset I picked up before Christmas. It;s still a rough OS with quite a few things that need to be done just as the designer intended, but it’s competent, and I’ve kinda missed the buzz that I used to get when carrying the early Psion PDA’s that felt the start of something new.