KHTML
web browser engine from TDE (formerly also KDE)
KHTML is a discontinued browser engine that was developed by the KDE project. It originated as the engine of the Konqueror browser in the late 1990s. Its development has been ceased in 2016 and it was officially discontinued in 2023.
Built on the KParts framework and written in C++, KHTML had relatively good support for Web standards during its prime. Engines that are forked from KHTML are used by most of the browsers that are widely used today, including WebKit (Safari) and Blink (Google Chrome, Chromium, Microsoft Edge, Opera, Vivaldi and Brave).
History
Origins
KHTML was preceded by an earlier engine called khtmlw or the KDE HTML Widget, developed by Torben Weis and Martin Jones, which implemented support for HTML 3.2, HTTP 1.0, and HTML frames, but not the DOM, CSS, or JavaScript.
KHTML itself came into existence on November 4, 1998, as a fork of the khtmlw library, with some slight refactoring and the addition of Unicode support and changes to support the move to Qt 2. Waldo Bastian was among those who did the work of creating that early version of KHTML.
Re-write and improvement
The real work on KHTML actually started between May and October 1999, with the realization that the choice facing the project was "either do a significant effort to move KHTML forward or to use Mozilla" and with adding support for JavaScript as the highest priority. So in May 1999, Lars Knoll began doing research with an eye toward implementing the DOM specification, finally announcing on August 16, 1999 that he had checked in what amounted to a complete rewrite of the KHTML library—changing KHTML to use the standard DOM as its internal document representation. That in turn allowed the beginnings of JavaScript support to be added in October 1999, followed shortly afterwards with the integration of KJS by Harri Porten.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “KHTML” as web browser engine from TDE (formerly also KDE). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q658029. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2016, 2023, 1998 and 1999.
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This entry incorporates text from “KHTML” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.