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Google going its own way, forking WebKit rendering engine

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Re: Google going its own way, forking WebKit rendering engine

#51

Post by sukuriant »

gurkendoktor wrote: post #50
tgandrews wrote: post #24

To me it sounds like a good thing. We end up with 3 major rendering engines on the desktop; Gecko (Firefox), Trident (IE) and Blink (Opera and Chrome) and 2 major on mobile Blink (Opera and Chrome) and Webkit (Safari). This I think will help shake up some of monoculture. Chrome definitely doesn't have any level of domination over the enterprise market like IE6 on Windows did. That was the problem with IE6 not the bro…

Isn't this contradictory? If a significant/relevant chunk of people use WebKit, and WebKit development lags behind Blink (and the others), then how will this not affect the web?

The idea is that, Webkit will have to keep up with the innovations in Blink, and maybe even try to innovate themselves, to maintain marketshare.

Re: Google going its own way, forking WebKit rendering engine

#52

Post by makomk »

doe88 wrote: post #34
doe88 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a fallacious argument in this context, this is a pretext, that's why I used the word 'hypocrisy'. And also I really think that a so called 'diversity' of implementations of open source projects may only really be sustainable for large companies with big resources to do things on their own and know they don't need to rely on anybody. But ask yourself, now, what if Apple decided that for being competitive with…

@jmillikin I remember they contributed back to the KHTML project by releasing a patch. Do your employer plan to release a patch back to Webkit? And you also seem to forget that back then there wasn't as many small vendors as there are today. Gecko never was much used outside of Mozilla, which is of course very different for Webkit.

Errrm, Apple did the bare minimum required by the license of the KHTML code they were using, which was to release the changes they'd made to KHTML as a single blob. It looks like Google has already done more to contribute back than Apple originally did.

Re: Google going its own way, forking WebKit rendering engine

#53

Post by Millennium »

gurkendoktor wrote: post #50
tgandrews wrote: post #24

To me it sounds like a good thing. We end up with 3 major rendering engines on the desktop; Gecko (Firefox), Trident (IE) and Blink (Opera and Chrome) and 2 major on mobile Blink (Opera and Chrome) and Webkit (Safari). This I think will help shake up some of monoculture. Chrome definitely doesn't have any level of domination over the enterprise market like IE6 on Windows did. That was the problem with IE6 not the bro…

Isn't this contradictory? If a significant/relevant chunk of people use WebKit, and WebKit development lags behind Blink (and the others), then how will this not affect the web?

He didn't say the Web wouldn't be affected; he said it wouldn't suffer. And it won't, because it forces the WebKit (and Gecko) folks to keep up with Blink, and the Blink folks to keep up with their keeping up. Everybody wins.

Re: Google going its own way, forking WebKit rendering engine

#54

Post by Millennium »

doe88 wrote: post #9

> Google also argues that the decision will introduce greater diversity into the browser ecosystem and might mitigate concerns that the mobile Web in particular was becoming a WebKit monoculture. Ahah so much hypocrisy condensed in this sentence. Yeah it's constraining to share code and have compile time #defines but if every vendor did the same there wouldn't be any common project.

What's hypocritical about it? WebKit itself was a fork of another engine; for another to split off is nothing but consistent with its history.

Re: Google going its own way, forking WebKit rendering engine

#55

Post by gillianseed »

hp50g wrote: post #20
pnathan wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Er. I would fully expect that a company would have its own agenda. Google's is/was organizing the world's information. It's a bit, um, something, to expect that they don't have an agenda, ne?

Indeed, and that is my point. Why would you build the tool to organize the world's information on top of a platform designed to serve a single vendor rather than the user and consumer of the technology? Google are playing a little game here similar to the antics Microsoft got up to in the early '00s. All it takes is some level of adoption and then a diversion away from this and all the other vendors spend forever pla…

How would that work in practice? The source code is open, anyone can pick it up and use it, thus getting any of it's features.

It's not even remotely comparable to the situation where Microsoft was leveraging their desktop market dominance bundling their _proprietary_ webbrowser.

Also in terms of competition we have an entirely different situation these days. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Mozilla all have plenty enough resources to continously enhance their browsers and keep the competition going, and of those four, three are providing the layout engines as open source, while two of them also release fully open source browsers (firefox, chromium).

It will be interesting to see how big a hole this makes in webkit's development pace, Google was the largest webkit contributor in 2012, basically twice as much code as the runner up Apple.

Also it will be interesting to see if Opera will stick to Webkit which it recently changed to, or if they will eventually hop aboard the 'Blink' train.

I for one welcome further competition in this field, particularly on the mobile front.

Re: Google going its own way, forking WebKit rendering engine

#56

Post by aidos »

coldtea wrote: post #40
coldtea wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source doesn't mean much when it comes to standards. It's all about who has control of the codebase. If you need to fork or kiss Google's ass to implement changes to it, then it's not really open. To put it better, it might still be "open source" but it's not a community or a multi-company project.

> So any repositories that don't have public commits enabled are 'not really open'? A ludicrous suggestion. WTF, have you even read my comment before answering? I explicitly said that those: "might still be open source but it's not a community or a multi-company project". And I never said anything about "public commits" being necessary for something being open, if by that you mean anybody to be able commit arbitraril…

Well, you said:

> If you need to fork or kiss Google's ass to implement changes to it, then it's not really open.

You're right - you can't be sure to get your changes added to the codebase, but that's not to say it's not open. Hey, at least the codebase is there for you to fork and enjoy. It's not totally open (maybe, we don't really know that yet - you're just assuming it won't be) - it's certainly not closed like many others however.

Re: Google going its own way, forking WebKit rendering engine

#58

Post by pjscott »

hp50g wrote: post #12

This reads like: "We're not sharing our stuff anymore as it's costing too much". A the risk of sounding like a paranoid nutbag, with stuff like NaCl, SPDY, Dart etc, it sounds like Google have their own agenda.

But they are sharing their changes. Opera is switching to Blink, too.

Re: Google going its own way, forking WebKit rendering engine

#59

Post by pjscott »

JamesPDX wrote: post #23

Google just realizes it cannot pretend to be a nice guy when the world no longer spins around it. So much for "do no evil"...

Forking things is evil now? It's not like they're making this closed-source, or changing it to be so Chrome-specific that other browsers won't be able to use it.

...Or was your post satirizing the generic "Google did a thing! They're evil now!" posts? I'm sometimes bad at detecting irony.

Re: Google going its own way, forking WebKit rendering engine

#60

Post by fpgeek »

elemeno wrote: post #41
jmillikin wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mono was banned from Microsoft's development conference (see http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2005/Sep-06.html ), and faced various sorts of legal threats regarding their implementation of .NET libraries not covered by the ECMA standards process (most notably ASP.NET). Samba benefited from Microsoft's documentation because Microsoft was forced to disclose it by court order.

Since Mono still seems to be going strong and seems to be one of the official platforms for F#, I'm not sure that something that happened seven years ago is necessarily great proof that they're smothering Mono.

It's proof that Microsoft's intentions towards Mono aren't dependable. They can (and have) changed dramatically, whenever Microsoft wants. Exactly how friendly do you think Microsoft will be if Mono stops being .NET's toehold in non-Microsoft mobile OSes?
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