Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Forks WebKit And Launches Blink, A New Rendering Engine

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 40 posts

Re: Google Forks WebKit And Launches Blink, A New Rendering Engine

#11

Post by coldtea »

mooism2 wrote: post #5
ChuckMcM wrote: post #3

" the decision to fork WebKit was entirely driven by the engineering teams and solely based on the fact that the engineers felt constrained by the technical complexity of working within the WebKit ecosystem." Is this code for "They wouldn't take our changes so we said, 'Fork it!' and made our own." ?

“Currently, the majority of WebKit reviewers are from Google (95), with Apple coming in second (59)... Google is also currently responsible for the vast majority of commits to the WebKit repository...” Doubtful.

Numbers are doubtful?

I mean, sure, one could fabricate them, but why, especially if he can easily be caught doing it? Those are things anybody can verify by looking at the repository stats.

Here's what I found with a cursory look: Google has overtook Apple in commits 2-3 years already:

http://blog.bitergia.com/2013/02/06/report-on-the-activity-o...

Older stats (already Google on top): http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2010/02/webkit-...

And a TechCrunch article on the issue: http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/06/google-apple-webkit/

Re: Google Forks WebKit And Launches Blink, A New Rendering Engine

#13

Post by stock_toaster »

dragonwriter wrote: post #6
ChuckMcM wrote: post #3

" the decision to fork WebKit was entirely driven by the engineering teams and solely based on the fact that the engineers felt constrained by the technical complexity of working within the WebKit ecosystem." Is this code for "They wouldn't take our changes so we said, 'Fork it!' and made our own." ?

> Is this code for "They wouldn't take our changes so we said, 'Fork it!' and made our own." ? I think its probably more exactly what it says -- a way of eliminating the overhead of dealing with the complexity of the WebKit ecosystem. As noted in the article, "Google says, for example, that it will be able to remove 7 build systems and delete more than 7,000 files comprising more than 4.5 million lines right off the…

This[1] other article infers that those lines/files are related to webkit2 features of multiprocessing and sandbox code.

So it seems to me that ChuckMcM may not be far off.

[1]: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/google...

Re: Google Forks WebKit And Launches Blink, A New Rendering Engine

#14

Post by teej »

OGinparadise wrote: post #12

Duh! Chrome, Youtube, Maps, Android and virtually everything serve Google's $$$$ making efforts. Same applies to Microsoft and other large corps, no matter how much they spin. So I use Firefox and will use for as long as they are independent.

You do realize that Google pays Firefox $300M a year, making them at least somewhat aligned to the business of Google?

Re: Google Forks WebKit And Launches Blink, A New Rendering Engine

#15

Post by ZeroGravitas »

jmillikin wrote: post #9
crimsonzagar wrote: post #7

This is just a personal opinion, but for a browser I'd always support and use a not-for-profit one. No matter how fast, or perceptibly fast, an offering from a business entity is. Here is why: 1. Tomorrow you, the billion dollar enterprise, will force real identity even more vehemently. 2. I certainly don't want to see a constant hum of ads. 3. I don't want to turn my computer into a wide-mouth bucket for chrome apps…

Current popular browsers are: * Firefox * Chrome / Chromium * Internet Explorer * Safari * Opera All of them are produced with the aim of benefiting their parent corporations in some way -- for example, Mozilla Corp rents the default search engine setting to Google for hundreds of millions per year. I currently use Firefox and Chromium as my primary browsers, because they are the only popular browsers that are open-s…

Mozilla Corp was set up by Mozilla Foundation for tax reasons. Firefox is produced with the aim of meeting the foundation's mission.

Re: Google Forks WebKit And Launches Blink, A New Rendering Engine

#16

Post by hp50g »

mooism2 wrote: post #5
ChuckMcM wrote: post #3

" the decision to fork WebKit was entirely driven by the engineering teams and solely based on the fact that the engineers felt constrained by the technical complexity of working within the WebKit ecosystem." Is this code for "They wouldn't take our changes so we said, 'Fork it!' and made our own." ?

“Currently, the majority of WebKit reviewers are from Google (95), with Apple coming in second (59)... Google is also currently responsible for the vast majority of commits to the WebKit repository...” Doubtful.

Reviewers and number of commits aren't really relevant stats. I'm the top committer and code reviewer at my company but it doesn't mean I write the most code :)

Re: Google Forks WebKit And Launches Blink, A New Rendering Engine

#17

Post by OGinparadise »

teej wrote: post #14
OGinparadise wrote: post #12

Duh! Chrome, Youtube, Maps, Android and virtually everything serve Google's $$$$ making efforts. Same applies to Microsoft and other large corps, no matter how much they spin. So I use Firefox and will use for as long as they are independent.

You do realize that Google pays Firefox $300M a year, making them at least somewhat aligned to the business of Google?

Yes, and I suspect that Firefox is, at least, not going to work against the way it makes its money (ads) but the alternative browsers have bigger conflicts of interest.

Re: Google Forks WebKit And Launches Blink, A New Rendering Engine

#18

Post by Apocryphon »

OGinparadise wrote: post #17
teej wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that Google pays Firefox $300M a year, making them at least somewhat aligned to the business of Google?

Yes, and I suspect that Firefox is, at least, not going to work against the way it makes its money (ads) but the alternative browsers have bigger conflicts of interest.

It's interesting to see open-source foundations get corporate patrons. Like Ubuntu's relation with Amazon.

Re: Google Forks WebKit And Launches Blink, A New Rendering Engine

#19

Post by ChuckMcM »

mooism2 wrote: post #5
ChuckMcM wrote: post #3

" the decision to fork WebKit was entirely driven by the engineering teams and solely based on the fact that the engineers felt constrained by the technical complexity of working within the WebKit ecosystem." Is this code for "They wouldn't take our changes so we said, 'Fork it!' and made our own." ?

“Currently, the majority of WebKit reviewers are from Google (95), with Apple coming in second (59)... Google is also currently responsible for the vast majority of commits to the WebKit repository...” Doubtful.

Reading through some of the analysis I agree, the story about the amount of glue necessary getting worse rather than better was pretty compelling. As a systems guy I find it amazing how intertwined the various parts are, between the process model to the rendering model, simplification there can only be good.
Post reply on HN