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Ubuntu developers announced Oxide, Chromium-powered library to be used in Ubuntu Touch's web-browser and Ubuntu SDK by Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
By installing Ubuntu, 30 million users from all over the world get an immediately-usable and powerful operating system, as well as security and maintenance support specific to the installed version of Ubuntu (LTS or standard).
As a consequence, the developers are developing Ubuntu with multiple scenarios, necessities and requirements in mind, among which ability to provide the latest technology trends to the users, security, speed and an overall optimal experience, bundle of goals achieved with carefully-selected libraries, default applications and sane means of consuming content.
The developers have announced Oxide, essentially, a library permitting the embedding of Chromium-powered webviews in applications, Oxide deeply managed by Ubuntu, in order to provide the best web-related experience both in the now and in the upcoming years.
"Oxide is a library that allows you to embed a Chromium-powered webview in QML applications. It currently provides a fairly trivial API that is quite similar to the current QML QtWebkit webview API for simple use cases, although it is nowhere near feature complete yet".
Oxide is based on the open-source web-browser Chromium, yet, providing the exact set of features required by Ubuntu, Oxide that is to fit perfectly in Ubuntu's upcoming converged experience.
At the moment, Oxide features:
- back, forward and reload actions
- load URLs
- multiple webviews support
- user scripts
essentially, an in-progress yet relevant pack of capabilities.
Yet, Oxide stands on interesting to-be-achieved goals, such as:
- accelerated compositing
- solid navigation
- dialog support (authentication, alert, confirm, prompt)
As the official goal, Oxide is to be used by Ubuntu Touch's web-browser and Ubuntu SDK in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu version that is to be supported for five years.
Oxide is not a mere concept, but real code with already-available capabilities, interested developers and users can digest its code on https://launchpad.net/oxide
"If you want to help out with this, feel free to grab me on IRC – I’ve got plenty of work I can hand out".