That turns the N800 into one of the most capable (albeit slow) web browsing devices that exist. You have the Opera Engine, the Mozilla Engine and now the WebKit engine as found on Safari and the S60 browser. If you can’t get your chosen web location working with the N800 then something is seriously wrong with the website, not the N800!

Origyn on the N800.

LinuxDevices published the news and have also published an article from Pleyo, company that is running the project. The browser is called Origyn (Origyn Web Browser, OWB) and is an open source project aimed at embedded and mobile applications.  Origyn uses the Webkit engine and it comes with an abstraction layer which is aimed at simplifying the job of integrating the browser into different platforms. The N800 port is just one of many that are possible from set top boxes, phones and even web tablets. Quite what the advantages are over the Mozilla engine (Opera is not open-source) weren’t clear to me so I turned to Pleyo for an answer. CTO Jean-Charles Verdie was kind enough to answer my email and highlighted a number of reasons why they went for the Webkit engine rather than Mozilla engine.

• The licensing model
• Footprint and CPU usage
• A clean source organisation which helped in fast porting.
• A better standard support (acid2, …)
• Benchmarks on low powered machines reported better performances at the time we began (Mozilla has improved its results since that time)

I guess the other reason is that MiniMo (Mozilla for the small-screen) is already a project in motion and it wouldn’t make sense to duplicate that work. As far as users are concerned, well, standards are not always the best. If most web development goes on in the Microsoft IE world then whatever they do is what the user needs to follow and that means having an Internet Explore browser. Fortunately, developers generally test for compatibility under Safari (Webkit), Firefox (Mozilla) and IE7. The only thing the user needs to choose between is cost and speed of browser.

Keep an eye on Pleyo and Sand-labs.org the site that is hosting the Origyn browser development.