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Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project

blog.chromium.org

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Re: Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project

#251

Post by alexchamberlain »

ebbv wrote: post #2

I can't help but think that forking WebKit is a business based decision since Apple controls WebKit. This blog post doesn't make an engineering based argument* so I'm left with the business ones. Which sucks. * - Just vague "we need to innovate faster" boilerplate. Which is what business people say when there's not a solid engineering based reason. EDIT: At the bottom of the project page are some engineering reasons:…

It looks like a lot of C++ projects atm; we need to throw out the chronies and fix their spaghetti code.

Re: Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project

#253

Post by othermaciej »

mikewest wrote: post #244
othermaciej wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We talked privately with particular Chrome folks before we started (as described upthread), in the middle, and shortly before landing to mention that we were landing soon. I don't know if the contents of these conversations were ever shared with the whole Chrome team as som Chrome people seemed super surprised at our announcement. It is true that when we announced our effort, it came with a rough working prototype an…

Hi Maciej. Sorry if my comments read as though I was implying that you were wrong or bullheaded to choose WebKit2. That wasn't my intention; there are of course good technical arguments for choosing either architecture, and I'll choose my words more carefully next time the question comes up.

Thanks, Mike. And sorry also if my reply was too lengthy or pedantic or otherwise out of place. I feel bad for getting into a back-and-forth about this.

Re: Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project

#254

Post by Y0L0 »

lotyrin wrote: post #248
InclinedPlane wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardly. Having a site that has buggy coding which has been tweaked to look good in IE's buggy rendering is a far cry from "our site uses cutting edge web-standard features that your browser does not support, please use a more up to date browser for a better experience". Night and day different.

No different. Were you not around when IE was the "cutting edge" and had all the newest features?

I guess you don't remember Netscape.

Re: Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project

#256

Post by tripzilch »

lotyrin wrote: post #248
InclinedPlane wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardly. Having a site that has buggy coding which has been tweaked to look good in IE's buggy rendering is a far cry from "our site uses cutting edge web-standard features that your browser does not support, please use a more up to date browser for a better experience". Night and day different.

No different. Were you not around when IE was the "cutting edge" and had all the newest features?

Ugh, I remember that time, having exactly those arguments. IE having all sorts of non-standard features, so other browsers should probably copy its quirks/bugs also.

To answer your sort-of question, that time was overshadowed when it became obvious that IE6 (and later IE7) was the absolute worst choice. And that's a reputation Microsoft is still trying to clean, years later.

Re: Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project

#257

Post by InclinedPlane »

lotyrin wrote: post #248
InclinedPlane wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardly. Having a site that has buggy coding which has been tweaked to look good in IE's buggy rendering is a far cry from "our site uses cutting edge web-standard features that your browser does not support, please use a more up to date browser for a better experience". Night and day different.

No different. Were you not around when IE was the "cutting edge" and had all the newest features?

I do, quite well. Proprietary features are miles away from cutting edge web-standards. Being locked into only one browser that works correctly is very, very much different from being able to chose from among many modern browsers (in the typical case).

More so, as I said that particular problem was not nearly as bad as people targeting the rendering of their site to the particular quirks of one particular browser. That was horrible, but it's not even remotely the same problem we face today.

Re: Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project

#258

Post by mikewest »

jacobr wrote: post #255

So what will the new User Agent string be? "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) Blink/537.33 (KHTML; like WebKit; like Safari; like Gecko) Chrome/27.0.1438.7"? Hopefully people will finally start using feature detection rather than user agent detection...

The user agent string is, for the moment, remaining exactly the same format. For better or worse, all those crufty bits are currently necessary for compatibility with sites doing a poor job of sniffing out functionality.

Re: Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project

#259

Post by lawl »

jxi wrote: post #246
meomix wrote: post #166

And so begins phase 2 of embrace, extend and extinguish. It's just what large tech companies do now days.

If you're going to badmouth this decision, then please at least read the articles and address the reasons they mentioned. It's pretty stupid and pointless to make irrelevant generalist statements.

Well I just came across this: http://prng.net/blink-faq.html I think it shows (some of) the concerns really well.

Not saying EEE is the strategy Google is trying to do here. But it's certainly a possibility and we should pay close attention IMO.

Re: Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project

#260

Post by tripzilch »

mikewest wrote: post #136
gioele wrote: post #135

Can someone explain this benefit: > Establish a simpler, stricter tree-gardening system that does not require 2 full time engineers per day "tree-gardening"?

WebKit and Chromium are different repositories, and point to each other via a "DEPS" (dependencies) file. We roll new revisions of WebKit into Chromium regularly, and call the process of diagnosing and fixing problems with the rolls "Gardening": http://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/webkit-gardening is a good reference.

Hey, clicking around that Wiki it has some pretty interesting information. Do other large open-source projects have a very similar workflow?
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