Design for Safari and Chrome Browsers

By Janine Warner, David LaFontaine, and Lee Andron from iPhone and iPad Web Design For Dummies

Safari and Chrome are WebKit browsers, based on the same WebKit rendering engine, which controls how the browser interprets HTML, CSS, and other code. All WebKit browsers follow the same rules (at least most of the time).

The iPhone, iPad, and iPod are all supplied with the Safari web browser, which is slightly different from the version that’s available for computer screens, as shown in this figure. Apple created the WebKit rendering engine and then released it to the open source community, where it has been further developed by Google, KDE, Nokia, Palm, ProFUSION, RIM, Samsung, and others.

The Apple Safari web browser uses the same WebKit rendering engine on the iPhone and iPad as it does on Windows and Mac computers.

Because WebKit works on many different types of phones, websites that work on Safari on the iPhone are likely to work well also on the latest Android phone models, BlackBerry phones by RIM, some Nokia phones, and a growing list of others.

Your mileage may vary, and you should always test your designs on the devices that you want your pages to work on; if you target WebKit browsers, however, you should be able to reach most of the smartphone market.

You can learn more about WebKit browsers, such as Safari, at the WebKit Open Source Project site.