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KHTML is an open source rendering engine - the software that takes the HTML and Javascript code that makes up Web pages and turns it into something readable on a computer screen. Apple chose it, rather than the Mozilla Gecko engine, when it decided to develop its own browser, namely Safari, which was released in January 2003.

Matters have come to a head with changes and bug fixes that Apple has recently made to ensure that Safari passes the Acid2 test for browser standards compliance. The open source community has complained (see So, when will KHTML merge all the WebCore changes? and Safari and KHTML again) that Apple has not made it easy or at least possible for its patches to be applied to the original KHTML source code. However, Safari developer Dave Hyatt said in Apple's defence that many of the patches were to its OS X WebCore software.

Many of the reports have therefore concluded that Apple may be ditching KHTML in favour of

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its own, WebCore renderer. In fact, the two are not exclusive. KHTML is but one element of WebCore. It is to this, not KHTML itself, that Apple has been making changes.

Of course this is all largely academic and of interest chiefly to developers, although if Safari were to get a new rendering engine you could expect some difference in both the way pages are displayed and in performance.

There are, however, advantages to Apple's approach. WebCore - which, incidentally, is itself available under an open source licence - forms part of OS X's Web Kit, which any developer can access. This means that there are dozens of applications that are enriched by the inclusion of Web browsing and rendering capabilities - such as Mail, BBEdit and NetNewsWire to name three of the more well-known.

Chief Firefox developer, Ben Goodger, who knows a thing or to about browsers and open source, thinks Apple's approach is justified.

'Not everyone wants to change the world, but Apple does - and although they may have done the least required of them in accordance with the licenses of the original source code, it was within their rights to do what they did, and no one should begrudge them for it,' he writes in his blog.

'Safari's renderer is vastly superior to the KHTML used by Konqueror [open source browser for Linux]. Should I have to wait months or years for every patch that makes Safari more compatible to be done perfectly? No. Well, maybe as a software engineer I should. But does anyone that isn't a software engineer care? Probably not. Case closed.'