PreCentral: Developer of Universe Web Browser returning to active webOS development

[News Reporter]

One of our favorite developers, Donald Kirker, has announced via his company blog that he plans to return to active development of his prize application, one of our favorite (and admittedly one of the few) web browsers for webOS,

link hidden, please login to view

. Kirker announced that he has begun development of version 2.0 of Universe, and while not announcing a release date he did note that the code will likely end up on his for the browser before it makes it to the App Catalog. In addition to this, he announced his intentions of working on a version of Universe formatted for tablet screens.

Kirker also made mention of his role in webOS Internals as their  and and his work on the open source for webOS, possibly implying a connection between Universe and Isis. At the very least he indicated that he plans to add some hooks into Isis for Universe so that he can add extra features currently not possible in webOS, such as user agent switching, the ability to disable images, text reflow, and "many reported rendering bugs." Kirker presumably was unable to add in many hooks to the WebKit engine included in webOS , as they still do not exist in the latest versions of webOS.

We look forward to what Donald can bring to Universe 2.0 and the tablet version, as well as what contributions he can make to Isis and to making it widely available to homebrew users. We welcome his return to webOS and will be closely following his work on both Universe and Isis, anxiously awaiting the day we can install Isis onto our TouchPads to upgrade our browsing experience and install Universe 2.0 onto our phones so we can get a better browsing experience there as well.