Is WebKit gaining any traction in non-web applications?

Question

I spoke to the boss of a major music software company a few years ago. He told me that if they were going to start again from the ground up, they might look at WebKit for their UI. This totally surprised me. But I'm wondering if other folks are thinking and acting this way. Is webkit working its way in to truly non-web software?

Answer 1

WebKit is an open source web browser engine.

It should be used to do web software.

Answer 2

Gwibber, a Gnome twitter client that ships with Ubuntu, uses WebKit for displaying timelines (although it uses normal GTK+ widgets for the surrounding UI).

I would consider WebKit a viable option for many pieces of UI, particularly if the program shell exposes appropriate hooks into the surrounding platform to do things like launch a real browser or hook in to system notifications. You run the serious risk, however, of building an application that doesn't fit well in the UI conventions of the user's operating system.

It's not WebKit, but building a UI on a rendering engine is essentially what Mozilla does - Firefox, Thunderbird, etc. are built in XUL rendered with Gecko.