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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

#321
post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that is the most ridiculous thing I've ever read. Pretty sure it's a troll post trying to make frontpage with sensationalist bullshit. For example, he claims it's a political move, yet the official FAQ lists many practical reasons for the move. Also, he says it will fragment the web: half the comments in this very thread explains why it won't. Then he says it's not open source because it's hard to understand how…

> For example, he claims it's a political move, yet the official FAQ lists many practical reasons for the move. So what? They couldn't make up excuses? > Also, he says it will fragment the web: half the comments in this very thread explains why it won't. And others argue why it will. > Then he says it's not open source because it's hard to understand how an HTML parser works? wtf? A complex multi-million line project…

> A complex multi-million line project representing 1000s of manyears of work, essentially needs dedicated full-time highly skilled engineers to be forked.

WebKit, from which Google Blink was forked includes dedicated, full-time, highly-skilled engineers from Apple and elsewhere that could incorporate material from Blink -- as well as all the other browser projects which might want to use material from WebKit (pre- or post-fork) or Blink; so the situation with regard to "open source"-ness is the same as it was before the fork, even with this "it needs full-time highly-skilled engineers" to use it proviso.

> Highly complex codebases seldom progress much as community projects after the original company has abandoned the paid contributors

Which is one of the reasons that forks between projects where both sides of the fork are paying contributors and the fork results in both sides being able to streamline and more efficiently return value to their sponsors (thus, making the sponsorship from both the prime sponsor of the original project and the sponsor that used to pay people to work on that project but which is now sponsoring their own fork more likely to continue) is good, as it puts each post-fork project on a more secure footing than the pre-fork project was.

Re: Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

The latest dev and beta channel significantly outperforms Safari scrolling IMHO.

Interesting, just tried it out. The framerate is smooth, but there's some lag in starting to scroll that makes it feel like the page has inertia.

Re: Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project

#323

Super excited about this! There was a long discussion on the webkit mailing list after google tried to add support for multiple language VMs in webkit. The goal was to have a native Dart VM. https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2011-December/... If I remember correctly, the patch was not merged in. I guess now google can do whatever it wants!

I've only read the first dozen of so entries of that thread but it's so depressing… We've been waiting for Apple to include support for the W3C Navigation Timing for a long time so their pissing match over multi-VM support in WebKit because it doesn't conform to standards rings hollow.

A long time? The working draft is dated January this year.

The multi vm discussion was in 2011. If you think supporting dart natively in a browser is a good thing you're either a google employee or have your head too far up googles ass to see they are the new Microsoft and this is/was an attempt no different than vbscript in ie

Re: Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project

#324
post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A request for clarification on why they refused was posed to a Chrome engineer in todays Blink Q&A ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlJob8K_OwE#t=13m34s ), and according to him the request for integration came shortly after Chrome was released, and the reason for their refusal was the sheer scale/complexity of the task. In light of this, your initial "if Google had only upstreamed their multiprocess support...we almo…

1) The answer wasn't "we'd like to do this but we're super busy right now, how about later" or "that's super complicated, will you guys put in a lot of the effort". It was a pretty direct no. We would have been willing to do much of the work. 2) My recollection is that we talked about it around a year after Chrome was released. Chrome Beta release date: September 2, 2008 Date of WebKit2 announcement: Thu Apr 8, 2010…

With regards to 3), yes it does affect it since a "flexible/malleable no" is an altogether different constraint from a "solid no", so the solution would be measured against a different yardstick in the former case. Pressing on with your own thing in the interests of time to market (and thereby further cementing the more mature implementation not being integrated) in that scenario does strike me as less than ideal/short-sighted.

This is somewhat moot with 1) and 2) being the case (or at the very least strongly perceived to be the case on your side). At any rate neither side being able to settle on a single version of events signals a communication problem, which makes the whole value of this hypothetical joint undertaking fuzzy anyway.

Re: Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project

#325
post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that is the most ridiculous thing I've ever read. Pretty sure it's a troll post trying to make frontpage with sensationalist bullshit. For example, he claims it's a political move, yet the official FAQ lists many practical reasons for the move. Also, he says it will fragment the web: half the comments in this very thread explains why it won't. Then he says it's not open source because it's hard to understand how…

> For example, he claims it's a political move, yet the official FAQ lists many practical reasons for the move. So what? They couldn't make up excuses? > Also, he says it will fragment the web: half the comments in this very thread explains why it won't. And others argue why it will. > Then he says it's not open source because it's hard to understand how an HTML parser works? wtf? A complex multi-million line project…

Why do you say paid GNOME contributors have been abandoned? Where do you get this idea, and which company are you referring to? Also, what do you mean by "GNOME development is lacklustre"?

Re: Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) The answer wasn't "we'd like to do this but we're super busy right now, how about later" or "that's super complicated, will you guys put in a lot of the effort". It was a pretty direct no. We would have been willing to do much of the work. 2) My recollection is that we talked about it around a year after Chrome was released. Chrome Beta release date: September 2, 2008 Date of WebKit2 announcement: Thu Apr 8, 2010…

I think it's reasonable to say this is one of those situations where different sides simply interpreted the situation very differently.

If this is actually true, then the schism is truly a tragedy.
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