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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

#211

Post by tuananh »

fpgeek wrote: post #209
cpeterso wrote: post #42

The good news is no -blink prefixes! Blink, like Mozilla, will avoid shipping vendor-prefixed features: Historically, browsers have relied on vendor prefixes (e.g., -webkit-feature) to ship experimental features to web developers. This approach can be harmful to compatibility because web content comes to rely upon these vendor-prefixed names. Going forward ... we will instead keep the (unprefixed) feature behind the…

I wonder if that's where the name came from: something any decent web developer would be ashamed to put in a vendor prefix.

they probably mean how fast it would render the page.

Re: Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project

#212

Post by Camillo »

kevincennis wrote: post #133
tolmasky wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe because anyone who has used Safari knows that WebKit2's multiprocess architecture is worse in practice. As a full-time Safari user I can tell you that things have gotten markedly worse since it went multiprocess. Pages go white momentarily (not crash) all the time, and on top of that they also crash all the time. Additionally, I believe that unlike Chrome, Safari has ONE separate process for all the tabs, and t…

Sincerely curious: why are you still a full-time Safari user in light of all those complaints?

I can confirm what tolmasky said about WebKit2, yet I'm also a Safari user. The interface just feels better for me, and Chrome has actually been getting worse in this respect. When I stopped using it, a few versions ago, it had started feeling more and more like a Chrome OS VM than like a browser on my Mac. I doubt they've changed course since then.

Re: Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project

#213

Post by kalleboo »

kevincennis wrote: post #133
tolmasky wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe because anyone who has used Safari knows that WebKit2's multiprocess architecture is worse in practice. As a full-time Safari user I can tell you that things have gotten markedly worse since it went multiprocess. Pages go white momentarily (not crash) all the time, and on top of that they also crash all the time. Additionally, I believe that unlike Chrome, Safari has ONE separate process for all the tabs, and t…

Sincerely curious: why are you still a full-time Safari user in light of all those complaints?

Safari is the only browser that has decent scrolling performance on a Retina MacBook. All the other browsers stutter really badly as soon as the page has any complexity with fixed elements (Facebook is a big one)

Re: Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project

#214

Post by othermaciej »

justinschuh wrote: post #206
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…

>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. Yes, I'm aware of that, but the work had been underway for a long time and was about to be dropped by the time there was a real heads up. So the core of the architecture was already being frozen from a larger perspective. >BTW I am not trying to p…

>> 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. > Yes, I'm aware of that, but the work had been underway for a long time and was about to be dropped by the time there was a real heads up. So the core of the architecture was already being frozen from a larger perspective.

Are you aware of the earlier conversation that occurred before we wrote any lines of code or even had a name? Where we talked about the possibility of just using Chromium's model if Google was willing to contribute it back? I have mentioned it twice - maybe you overlooked those parts of my remarks.

> Chromium's architecture was public and available, but we assumed it wasn't used because it didn't fit the needs of WebKit2. There's no malice in that. We designed Chromium from the beginning for SFI (as Adam tried to convey), and that incurs quite a bit of complexity.

It had nothing to do with SFI (which wasn't brought up at the time) or complexity. It was for the reasons I stated upthread.

Re: Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project

#215

Post by slacka »

> "For example, we anticipate that we’ll be able to remove 7 build systems and delete more than 7,000 files—comprising more than 4.5 million lines"

On my 2GB netbook, chrome has gone from my preferred browser to unusable due to the high memory footprint of recent builds. I wonder if this cleanup will help get the memory down to something reasonable like where it was up until Chrome 10 or so.

Re: Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project

#216

Post by kevincennis »

kalleboo wrote: post #213
kevincennis wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sincerely curious: why are you still a full-time Safari user in light of all those complaints?

Safari is the only browser that has decent scrolling performance on a Retina MacBook. All the other browsers stutter really badly as soon as the page has any complexity with fixed elements (Facebook is a big one)

Yeah, that's certainly true. Pretty frustrating to have spent $2,500 or whatever it was on my retina MBP and I can't smoothly scroll websites with more than like 500 DOM nodes in Chrome.

Re: Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project

#217

Post by smith7018 »

Achshar wrote: post #207
plorkyeran wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice you won't actually be able to drop them from the compiled stylesheet for a very long time, of course.

Chrome has a very quick release cycle, so I don't see why not?

Webkit is used by Safari (desktop and iOS) which is still a huge portion of internet users.

Re: Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project

#218

Post by basch »

svachalek wrote: post #187
ionforce wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There already are speed differences in iOS alone. The native Safari has a faster JavaScript engine than the sandboxed Safari instances that iOS apps use. Or something like that. Something about security concerns.

It's the JIT for JavaScript that's disabled. I've never seen an official statement on it but I've read that it's that the security model in iOS does not allow compiling code and then executing it, but Mobile Safari gets a unique bypass for this security. Other apps which merely embed a UIWebView are stuck with interpreted JavaScript.

unless you have nitrous installed. http://lifehacker.com/5930405/nitrous-speeds-up-google-chrom...

Re: Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project

#219

Post by signed0 »

nnethercote wrote: post #193
yanw wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture ... and supporting multiple architectures over the years has led to increasing complexity ... we anticipate that we’ll be able to remove 7 build systems and delete more than 7,000 files—comprising more than 4.5 million lines How is that not engineering based?

Last time I measured (late 2012) the entire mozilla-central repository was 4.488 million lines of code. So I don't believe that by simply streamlining things they'll be able to remove anything like 4.5 million lines. Perhaps an extra zero got inserted somewhere.

4.5 million lines spread over 7,000 files is only ~642 lines per file, so I doubt there is an extra zero. Perhaps they included whitespace and comments in their count.

Re: Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project

#220

Post by basch »

deadc0de wrote: post #201
hiker wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite the opposite, see http://www.chromium.org/blink#vendor-prefixes

I mean use the monopoly to take the tech, clone, tweak, and then don't contribute back. Thankfully google will keep it open source since they're making money from it quite indirectly. But still.. A "fork you" to apple that would make the web suffer. Douchy.

Isnt "take the tech, clone, tweak, and then don't contribute back" exactly the model Apple used to create webkit from khtml. If memory serves, the khtml team was incredibly unhappy with apple trying to submit giant monolithic and undocumented commits.
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