I know this is OT, but how hard would it be to create a thin layer so that WebKit run on bare metal?
wasn't that the goal of webOS ?
WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines
201–210 of 214 posts
Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
More like half a dozen people and something like 12-18 months (jgraham will correct me) to make the world's fastest JS JIT. But your bigger point stands.
Carakan was 16.5 months from first commit to shipping (and a month or so more to not being notably buggy), with a team of five for the vast majority of that time. The only code carried over verbatim from Futhark was the regexp engine (though that had machine-code generation added to it), and the parser was also pre-existing (though not shared with Futhark!). For comparison: MS were the last to do a major rewrite of t…
When discussing timeframes, it's important to keep the moving goalposts in mind.
Back in 2009 it took order of 16 months to write a competitive JIT. But today's JITs are a good bit faster than they were in 2009, which means more special cases that need to be considered and made fast, from what I've seen of JIT development.
I should also note that I included QA resources of various sorts in my team size estimate....
Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines
#203The 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.…
> Soon we can get rid of the standards committee and just talk to the implementers of webkit to define the "standard".
Your comment in 1995: Soon we can get rid of the standards committee and just talk to the implementers of Netscape to define the "standard".
And in 2001: Soon we can get rid of the standards committee and just talk to the implementers of IE to define the "standard".
And in 2006: Soon we can get rid of the standards committee and just talk to the implementers of Firefox to define the "standard".
...and for more comparison:
Your comment in the late 70's on computers: Soon we can get rid of the hobbyists and just talk to Apple to define "standard".
And in 1996: Soon we can get rid of Apple and just talk to the creators of the PC to define the "standard".
And in 2010: Soon we can get rid of the PC and just talk to the creators of the iPad to define the "standard".
Just sayin'
Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines
#204I 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.
Agreed.
Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lets step back from the "open" buzzword and look at the empirical facts. Less than a decade ago you made sure your web sites ran well in Internet Explorer, a closed source browser that was allowed to stagnate. IE took the W3Cs standards as more like "guidelines" and not a specification. - Today, every major web browser (except IE) uses an open source rendering engine (or the browser itself is open source. - Every maj…
... and before IE it was Netscape: people didn't like that either, but you (and most people who talk about browser history) seem to forget or ignore that :(. If you go back and read through the W3C mailing lists people really really hated Netscape (the by-far dominant web browser at the time, for which books on HTML would have sections dedicated to optimizing for and would even go as far as to say being Netscape-only…
Well, to be honest, why did Opera once had ads?
And on Netscape and CSS: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2108940
Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
While it may be true, we haven't actually seen a new layout engine written, so it's pretty difficult to estimate how long it'd take. Webkit was mostly functional as KHTML many years and tens to hundreds of developers ago.
We've seen a new layout engine written. Gecko. It took about 15-16 years to get to where it is now, with on average probably ~100 developers. Granted, you can argue it wasn't the most efficient path to get there, but I doubt that you could rebuild Gecko (or WebKit) from scratch today in fewer than 5 years with a team that's about that size... For that matter, it's not like KHTML sprang out of the void fully-formed; I…
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Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
While it may be true, we haven't actually seen a new layout engine written, so it's pretty difficult to estimate how long it'd take. Webkit was mostly functional as KHTML many years and tens to hundreds of developers ago.
We've seen a new layout engine written. Gecko. It took about 15-16 years to get to where it is now, with on average probably ~100 developers. Granted, you can argue it wasn't the most efficient path to get there, but I doubt that you could rebuild Gecko (or WebKit) from scratch today in fewer than 5 years with a team that's about that size... For that matter, it's not like KHTML sprang out of the void fully-formed; I…
I understand that a new layout engine could be an order of magnitude more work, but I'd like to be optimistic.
The problem I see, is when we start talking about projects that require 100+ men at 5+ years of work, on a project that in particular has no real viable intermediate stages, history seems to suggest to me that it just doesn't get done. The difference with gecko, is it was being advanced with the state of the web, rather than spending 10 years catching up.
A very large part of the problem is that you can't just render part of HTML5 and expect to be in a shipping, and major browser. What do you do with a half done layout engine?
Does a project like Servo really have any hope of completion if that's the case?
Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
We've seen a new layout engine written. Gecko. It took about 15-16 years to get to where it is now, with on average probably ~100 developers. Granted, you can argue it wasn't the most efficient path to get there, but I doubt that you could rebuild Gecko (or WebKit) from scratch today in fewer than 5 years with a team that's about that size... For that matter, it's not like KHTML sprang out of the void fully-formed; I…
I understand that a new layout engine could be an order of magnitude more work, but I'd like to be optimistic. The problem I see, is when we start talking about projects that require 100+ men at 5+ years of work, on a project that in particular has no real viable intermediate stages, history seems to suggest to me that it just doesn't get done. The difference with gecko, is it was being advanced with the state of the…
That's a really good question. I wish I knew the answer.
Such projects have in fact happened. Windows Vista development started in 2001 and did not finish until end of 2006, with a much larger team than we're talking about here. Of course it's not clear to me that this was _planned_ to take 5 years...
Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you think exactly is my argument? I'm just talking about the way things are, not some ideal that I'm holding up. Also, your commentary has major holes in it: > webkit itself is by far the youngest rendering engine around and also among the most complete WebKit was formally released by Apple almost 8 years ago after being in development secretly for at least a couple years before that. That encompasses the ent…
I did not say it was brand new, but it is the youngest and that's inarguable. It's pre-webkit state also was not exactly much to write home about, and I say that having been a user of Konqueror back in the day. Google seems to be replacing the AOSP browser in Android with Chrome, btw. I think you underestimate the non-technical cost of entry of a new browser by a lot while overestimating the technical. I'm not saying…
No, it's only 15 years old out of 20 years of the history of the web. Sheesh.
Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines
#210https://html5test.com/results/desktop.html Why does Firefox do so poorly? ;_; Mozilla is such a good organization (but to be fair can only survive with Google).
Because much of what it tests isn't in HTML5. Some of what it tests isn't even standards track (e.g. WebSQL). The tests are also usually pretty superficial and test things like "does this property exist", not "does this feature work".