WebKit is an application framework included with Mac OS X v10.3 and later (and available as a software update for v10.2.7 and later) which is the basis of Mac OS X's Safari web browser, allowing third party developers to include much of Safari's functionality in their own products with very little work.
WebKit's Objective-C API provides the capability to interact with a web server, retrieve and render web pages, download files, and manage plugins.
WebKit includes two lower-level frameworks: WebCore?, an HTML parser and renderer based on KHTML, and JavaScriptCore?, a JavaScript? engine based on KJS. Both are heavily modified from the KDE originals for performance, web site compatibility and standards compliance.
On June 7, 2005, Safari developer Dave Hyatt announced on his weblog that Apple was open sourcing WebKit (previously, only WebCore? and JavaScriptCore? were open source) and opening up access to the CVS tree and Bugzilla tool for it. This move was first announced at Apple's WWDC 2005 by Bertrand Serlet. The code was later moved from CVS to Subversion on January 7, 2006.
On June 13, 2005, Nokia announced that it was developing a browser based on WebKit, which was later named Web Browser for S60.
On December 15, 2005 support for Scalable Vector Graphics was merged into the standard build.
On January 10, 2006 the CVS tree was migrated to Subversion.
On June 11, 2007 a Windows port was added to WebKit.
On July 23, 2007, Ars Technica published an article announcing that the KDE team was going to move from KHTML to WebKit
