I'd say the big risk with webkit which no-one is addressing is that it's LGPL not GPL. Someone could get a dominant position and use a closed fork of it. (The fact that Apple open-sourced Webkit is to its credit.)
WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines
161–170 of 214 posts
Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
Yes it was part of the kernel. Sure it had a team dedicated to it but so does everything big.
Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines
#163The 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.…
> It feels like we're walking into the dark age of the internet.
The persuasiveness of your argument is harmed by this sort of melodrama.
By the way, the "Dark Ages" are named such because of a lack of written historical records from the Early Middle Ages. The negative connotation attached to the phrase by the general public is considered inaccurate by historians.
Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yahoo uses the YUI library
YUI stands for Yahoo User Interface. They wrote it and open-sourced it, like Google with the Closure Library. I wouldn't count it as a third-party library.
Right, it's not 3rd party, but it is included in the statistics that show 90% jQuery market share, and the argument was that the biggest websites are not represented there.
Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
And that's bad why? So the web only works with one rendering engine. One rendering engine that's open source and can be used and modified by anyone for any purpose. Standards are great for things like protocols (even languages), but an entire web browser is a tad more complicated than TCP or even C++. No two browsers have ever implemented HTML/JS/CSS perfectly and they never will. If that's the case, then what's the…
One rendering engine that has some serious limitations, like not being very parallelizable, because of highly entrenched implementation choices. Which means that if you want hardware capable of rendering the web it can't be low-power highly-parallel hardware; it has to be high-power-consumption fast-serial-operation hardware. Why is that bad? I guess that's a matter of perspective. I think that would be a terrible ou…
And to stretch that a bit, the same apply for operating systems, text editors, heck, clothes color, clothes type, food, etc.
No choice & diversity = always been a bad idea and never, ever led to efficiency, progress, etc. It has always and every time led to the opposite.
Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines
#166I'd say the big risk with webkit which no-one is addressing is that it's LGPL not GPL. Someone could get a dominant position and use a closed fork of it. (The fact that Apple open-sourced Webkit is to its credit.)
The LGPL doesn't work that way. You can't fork WebKit and keep your changes closed unless you don't distribute your browser to anyone. Now, you could use webkit along with (for example) a closed Javascript runtime, but that really has nothing to do with WebKit itself.
Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know if it does or does not. Maybe. Was the Opera browser engine doing anything to provide a more parallel engine option? If not, it arguable wasn't helping in this respect either. Since WebKit is open source, can't you just submit bugfixes for the bugs that are parallelism bottlenecks? Seems like that would make a lot more sense than coding another engine to accommodate those bugs. If it truly is a bug, ther…
Assuming that no webpages are reliant on those bugs, sure. One of the problems with everyone targetting a single rendering engine is that they become reliant on the bugs of that engine, to the point that it becomes difficult to make any changes without breaking compatibility. Look at IE, for instance, especially the IE7-compatibility mode in later versions which wasn't IE7 compatible.
Hell don't look at IE, look at Windows, Windows guys had to rewrite a CORRECT implementation of logic check if SimCity was running and turn of a special flag to run the old version of allocator.
http://ianmurdock.com/platforms/on-the-importance-of-backwar...
Now multiply that story for every badly written WebKit site that relies on some backward ass crazy bug that no maintainer sees fit to fix.
Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines
#168I disagree with much of this article. > as a contributor to WebKit you have the complete ability to drive it in a direction you wish (often for the better) Not really. Follow the internal WebKit politics and you see a lot of conflicts. For example, Google wanted to push multi-VM support (for Dart) and Apple blocked that. > WebKit is already a de facto standard On mobile . Mobile isn't everything. Also, should we have…
"On mobile. Mobile isn't everything."
And.. mobile is not nothing. mobile is huge.
Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines
#169The 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.…
And that's bad why? So the web only works with one rendering engine. One rendering engine that's open source and can be used and modified by anyone for any purpose. Standards are great for things like protocols (even languages), but an entire web browser is a tad more complicated than TCP or even C++. No two browsers have ever implemented HTML/JS/CSS perfectly and they never will. If that's the case, then what's the…
A Monoculture by itself has a very bad property.
It's easy to use and misuse on a large scale. What runs same everywhere is great for app and crackers alike.
Its size make it a valid target of all kinds of dubious organization to target. And not just target exploits existing, but introducing new exploits into the source.
Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
YUI stands for Yahoo User Interface. They wrote it and open-sourced it, like Google with the Closure Library. I wouldn't count it as a third-party library.
Right, it's not 3rd party, but it is included in the statistics that show 90% jQuery market share, and the argument was that the biggest websites are not represented there.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say, but I don't see anybody making that argument in this thread.