A Short Translation from Bullshit to English of Selected Portions of the Google Chrome Blink Developer FAQ: http://prng.net/blink-faq.html
Some are true, but most are over the top.
Google going its own way, forking WebKit rendering engine
101–105 of 105 posts
Re: Google going its own way, forking WebKit rendering engine
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
@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.
Would be great if they answered this question though https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2013-April/024...
Re: Google going its own way, forking WebKit rendering engine
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just like IE6 had to catch up to stay in the market, and thus could not hurt the web? :) And installing an alternative browser was easier on Windows machines than on mobile devices. It doesn't even matter who will be the leader - if Apple leads, Android users will lose; if Google leads, Apple users will lose. Except if people start to buy smartphones based on the HTML rendering engine.
Except the assumption here is that improvements must necessarily be slower. But that's not necessarily true: collaboration between Chromium and WebKit was already incredibly problematic and was definitely slowing people down ( http://infrequently.org/2013/04/probably-wrong/ ). So there's a tradeoff--you're splitting people's efforts, and that's bad, but you're also removing pain points that slow down development.
Ah, gotcha. So what I'll mourn for is not the world of four days ago - but the world before Chromium and WebKit2 had split in the first place. :)
Re: Google going its own way, forking WebKit rendering engine
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 m…
How exactly did you determine that the (sole) purpose of the fork is "full control"? And how specifically is that going to happen?
forking is by nature for taking control. not sure why I'm even replying. that like saying the fire burns.
the difference is the leverage over people, programmers, website, and other companies google has by having this control - due to the marketshare of chrome.
Re: Google going its own way, forking WebKit rendering engine
#105Some people here are confused about the business side of making a browser for Google. I even saw mentions that Google Chrome is just a good will project to make the Web a better palce.
While that is partially true, Google Chrome also has a very strong business strategy behind it.
Right now it is the main distribution channel for Google Search. Every download of the browser is converted (with a probability, of course) to more searches or to a switch-over from another search engine.
For quite a long time (several years) search engine quality has not been selling itself. Many people do not notice any real difference between Bing/Baidu/Yandex/Seznam and Google.
Google invented search distribution with Google Toolbar (which was a tremendous success from business side) and right now Google Chrome is the new Google Toolbar. One of the main KPIs for Google Chrome product is Google Search market share. Specifically they directly optimize for Google Search share from inside Google Chrome which when multiplied by the share of the browser converts into money.
Just wanted to clarify things, sorry if not mentioning Blink made this comment an off-topic one.