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

WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines

ejohn.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 214 posts

Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines

#101

Post by bzbarsky »

petercooper wrote: post #53

I don't disagree but I also see it more as WebKit as the "Linux kernel" of browser engines. Safari and Chrome both use WebKit but are very different in what they offer.. so they're like the Ubuntu and RedHat. Is it a bad thing that AIX and Solaris fell by the wayside in a rush to Linux? I don't think so. So neither should adopting WebKit as a sort of common kernel in browsers, IMHO. But that's all it is.. MHO ;-)

The difference is that we've been actively moving to trying to make things people actually care about (like, say, access to basic information or government services) kernel-agnostic, and we view cases when a specific kernel is required to accomplish some basic computing task as a failure. With browser engines, some people think that way but many don't, as this discussion makes clear.

Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines

#102

Post by kenjackson »

tolmasky wrote: post #89
jeresig wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forking WebKit is effectively the same as writing your own browser, with regards to standardization. At the end of the day you want to get everyone to agree on the standard -- having an implementation that everyone can use only helps to sweeten the deal.

The response was more in regards to the grand-OP's desire for a lower level extensible runtime and lamentation about plugins, more than a comparison to standards now that I think about it. In other words, which web is more open: 1. One in which all the code is open source but there are huge hurdles to releasing your own browser, and any new feature is thus at the mercy of just a few big companies (Apple, Google, etc.…

I like how you've stated it, and made my original premise less confrontational and more of a question about what you value as "open".

Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines

#103

Post by bzbarsky »

hemancuso wrote: post #27

In the past there was some amount of competitive advantage in owning the rendering/browser engine. You could add unique features, fix things your competitors wouldn't, whatever. These days performance is heavily driven by the javascript runtime. While it's challenging to write a browser engine, it is much much more challenging to write a really fast JIT'ing javascript runtime. It seems unlikely Opera would have been…

Actually, writing a fast and compatible browser engine is a much larger project (at least an order of magnitude larger) than writing a fast JS JIT.

Just for scale, the latter takes about 2-3 years as recent history has shown, with a team that numbers a few dozen people at most. The former takes hundreds of developers, and several more years...

Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines

#104

Post by camus »

pestaa wrote: post #56
phpnode wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Backbone, Angular, Meteor etc etc ALL use jQuery!

Wrong. At least Angular JS brings its own jQuery-like functions and does not depend on jQuery by itself.

angularjs uses jquery api , like zepto does it is a hidden dependency. but you are basically using a subset of jquery when you use angularjs.

Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines

#105

Post by rimantas »

kenjackson wrote: post #71

The web is not open and becoming increasingly less so. People love to talk about how the web is about open standards and such, but it really is rather quite closed. It's driven less by standards and more by de-facto implementations. Soon we can get rid of the standards committee and just talk to the implementers of webkit to define the "standard". And I think even worse has been the wholesale discounting of plugins.…

Web being open has nothing to do with the number of rendering engines for browsers. Even having zero of them would not affect the openness of the web in any way. Firewalls would.

  > It's driven less by standards and more by de-facto implementations.
That was always the case. In fact, one of the goals of WHATWG (fathers of HTML5) was to standardise how the code is rendered even if it is invalid.

Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines

#106

Post by DigitalJack »

pcwalton wrote: post #79
petercooper wrote: post #53

I don't disagree but I also see it more as WebKit as the "Linux kernel" of browser engines. Safari and Chrome both use WebKit but are very different in what they offer.. so they're like the Ubuntu and RedHat. Is it a bad thing that AIX and Solaris fell by the wayside in a rush to Linux? I don't think so. So neither should adopting WebKit as a sort of common kernel in browsers, IMHO. But that's all it is.. MHO ;-)

"Is it a bad thing that AIX and Solaris fell by the wayside in a rush to Linux? I don't think so." Note that Solaris innovated with ZFS, which helped spur Linux to implement btrfs. Competition matters, even in OS kernels.

I'm a little ignorant of the details here, but was ZFS a part of the Sun kernel?

I know the linux kernel is mostly monolithic, is the Solaris/openIndiana kernel the same?

Even if it is, it seems unlikely to me that the core kernel team had much to do with ZFS.

It's really more about competition between file systems, or so it seems to me. Maybe I'm splitting hairs.

Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines

#107

Post by bzbarsky »

jeresig wrote: post #9
StavrosK wrote: post #7

I like the arguments: "Don't worry about happening, because it's already happened!"

Pretty much! People worry that the transition to a WebKit monoculture would result in some terrible things. On the contrary Chrome has shown that a shared rendering engine does not result in stagnation. Stagnation is a separate concern from a shared core.

Ah, but it does result in stagnation on many axes. Where's the Google or Apple effort to add significant intra-page parallelism to WebKit? It's too hard in that codebase, so it's not happening. If you require that codebase for a web browser, that means no significant parallelism in web browsers.

(There's some work being done to parallelize the rendering pipeline, and a bit on painting, but parallel CSS layout seems to be completely off the table in existing browser implementations.)

Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines

#108

Post by bzbarsky »

wvenable wrote: post #45
cs702 wrote: post #4

WebKit and jQuery -- and Bootstrap -- are becoming the new 'Win32 API.'

Why say Win32? Why not say WebKit and jQuery are the new Linux? It's actually a better analogy. Software monoculture is not inherently a bad thing; it can be a good thing. Re-inventing the wheel isn't progress. The world is much better off with Linux than 20 different Unix variants. And the world is likely better off with WebKit than dozens of different browser variants. The issue isn't having a software monoculture,…

Re-inventing the wheel isn't progress, but coming up with radically better solutions is. And that's much harder to do if you have to not just match a specification but also be bug-for-bug compatible with an existing large codebase that you have to reverse-engineer to achieve said compatibility.

Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines

#109

Post by DigitalJack »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #93
snprbob86 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your point? There's also Trident (IE) and Gecko (FF), just like there's NT and BSD.

There are dozens if not hundreds of kernels in development today. Some developed as small niche side projects. Some in proprietary embedded products. Some purely as research experiments. I do not see that type of diversity in browser engines and I think it is absolutely as important.

Diversity for the sake of diversity isn't going to get anywhere. That is basically gambling that something good will fall out of a different implementation just because it is different.

Instead, focus on solving problems. If the best way to solve a problem is to use webkit, then why do otherwise? If the best way is to go back and fork webkit from 2 years ago, and start your project from there, do that instead.

But don't be different just because you want to be different. Target your ambition toward something more meaningful.

Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines

#110

Post by eterm »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #75
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On desktop the only browsers that use Webkit are Chrome (about 1/3 of the market), Safari (about 1/10) and now Opera (currently unreleased). So roughly two thirds of the market are on non-webkit engines which I think contradicts your argument as there's still competition there. However, on mobile (a market which Chrome has only just entered) you could say that webkit is dominant and that we can already see problems t…

According to Statcounter.com's current numbers, Chrome is 36.9%, Safari is 8.57%, and Opera is 1.2% = 46.67%, leaving 53.3% for everything else. That's not "roughly two thirds". Also, Safari and Chrome are both trending upwards, everything else is trending downwards. http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-200807-201302

When it comes to mobile, "everything else" is the android default which is also webkit.
Post reply on HN