WebKit made big news in November after it was revealed that it would become the rendering engine in Google’s Android platform. The announcement came as a surprise to some who assumed that Google’s cozy relationship with the Mozilla foundation would lead them to select the Gecko rendering engine. WebKit however, holds the distinction of already being a well established platform for mobile devices, seeing service on a series of Nokia internet tablets and of course, on the iPhone. Not bad for a browser that was once doomed to die.

The WebKit team has had a busy December as well, adding support for the getElementsByClassName JavaScript function, beginning to add support for HTML 5, creating a new JavaScript benchmark called SunSpider and getting ready for its big Qt 4.4 and GTK debuts. WebKit is rapidly becoming a major contender in the browser wars, and is poised to replace KDE’s KHTML (which WebKit was originally based on) with the release of the KDE 4 desktop environment next year.

–Matthew Rosenhein