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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

#61

Post by zobzu »

coldtea wrote: post #49
jmillikin wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has a history of being hostile to the open-source and free-software communities. They release "shared source" code under licenses with onerous terms or encumbered with patents. In the event that an open-source project built on their technology becomes popular, Microsoft attempts to smother it (for example, see their treatment of Mono). I trust Google about as much as I trust Red Hat, Canonical, or any other…

> I trust Google about as much as I trust Red Hat, Canonical, or any other company with a history of friendly interaction with the community. While I'm certainly not going to give them my SSH keys, it seems reasonable to take advantage of open-source software that they release Yes, but then again you work for Google too. That alone could be basis for bias. I certainly don't trust Google as much as Red Hat or Canonica…

Can't disagree here. Trust is hard to get, easy to lose, and once it's lost.. good luck getting that back.

Of these 3 I only trust RedHat with their intents. And I don't think we're alone. And that doesn't mean RedHat is the greatest company ever, but I do trust them (I'd also probably never work for them, for that matter).

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

#62

Post by zobzu »

ok_craig wrote: post #28
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"...

Funny how when Opera deprecates its engine in favor of WebKit we all make a big deal about how it's bad for everyone. But when Google spins off their own version, we vilify them too... For real?

I don't think it has much to do with anything.

Opera used Webkit because they had no choice. It was that or dying.

Google forks webkit because even thus they have a massive control over it, they don't have _enough_ control.

There are still things other contributors refuse loud enough. Well, like Dart. Or the implementation of Webkit2. Or what not.

Since Google has the major browser marketshare, they're like "wait a moment, we're the masters of the game here, why the fuck can't we just dictate the rules? it's our browser that's mainly running this."

Well, now, there will be zero barrier to this. Not even disagreements.

So.. it is a quite different thing indeed.

The other intents Google have are good, but unfortunately, I'm near certain the REAL interest is the one I and others listed: CONTROL. FULL CONTROL. Things will inevitably go that way. Even if some devs working on Chromium are fooled right now. There is no way you don't get this without making Chromium an entity fully separated from Google, and that ain't happening.

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

#63

Post by lawnchair_larry »

jmillikin wrote: post #26
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…

> But ask yourself, now, what if Apple decided that for > being competitive with Google they must do the same > thing and ditch everything that don't suit to their > plans? They did, remember? WebKit was an open-source rendering engine that Apple secretly forked, worked on in private, and then released as a new project. At the time, people were quite upset that Apple hadn't simply adopted an extant dominant open-sour…

How has history proven that what Apple did was "obviously" better than using Gecko?

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

#64

Post by mehrzad »

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…

My problem with the Webkit monopoly was that it made it harder to use a FOSS browser. Webkit Nightly and Chromium are both nightly browsers which isn't good for the majority of people. Firefox is FOSS, but if Webkit took over, it would be hurt, as it has been.

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

#65

Post by crag »

jmillikin wrote: post #31
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that Microsoft hasn't been trustworthy historically, but how have they smothered Mono? And a counter-example is Samba.

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.

Ahhh 2005? Com'on. Much has changed at MS these days. Except licensing. Which is a nightmare to figure out. But MS isn't the only company with that shame.

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

#66

Post by codemac »

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…

I was all worried about this being the beginning of a proprietary browser, Google owning both a majority of user services and a majority of their browser tech stack. Both hidden in some proprietary garden.

Then I stopped sucking and looked up stuff from the article.

Blink is a part of the chromium project, and is equivalently open[fn:0]. So that means it's equivalent to any other open source fork.

Mailing list drama, duplicating technical work, etc will happen but hopefully this will contribute to having even more high quality open web implementations available.

[fn:0] http://www.chromium.org/blink/developer-faq#TOC-Is-this-goin...

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

#67

Post by AnthonyMouse »

mehrzad wrote: post #64
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…

My problem with the Webkit monopoly was that it made it harder to use a FOSS browser. Webkit Nightly and Chromium are both nightly browsers which isn't good for the majority of people. Firefox is FOSS, but if Webkit took over, it would be hurt, as it has been.

Chromium as packaged by most Linux distributions is not a "nightly build" sort of a thing. It's only a hassle if you run a non-FOSS operating system without a package manager, and in that case having to run Chrome instead of Chromium is the least of your issues re: FOSS.

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

#68

Post by gcr »

sukuriant wrote: post #51
gurkendoktor wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Webkit's done plenty of innovating, haven't they?

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

#69

Post by pyre »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #63
jmillikin wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But ask yourself, now, what if Apple decided that for > being competitive with Google they must do the same > thing and ditch everything that don't suit to their > plans? They did, remember? WebKit was an open-source rendering engine that Apple secretly forked, worked on in private, and then released as a new project. At the time, people were quite upset that Apple hadn't simply adopted an extant dominant open-sour…

How has history proven that what Apple did was "obviously" better than using Gecko?

I think that the point being made is that we now have 3 popular rendering engines loose on the web: WebKit, Trident, and Gecko. This diversity and competition gives us a much better ecosystem to work within than even the dual culture of IE* / Gecko.

* Trident might not even exist if not for the significant competition (or the name might not be the same were history changed).

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

#70

Post by Achshar »

gcr wrote: post #68
sukuriant wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Webkit's done plenty of innovating, haven't they?

That was with help of google. Google had incentiv to work on webkit, not anymore. Now webkit folk are on their own.
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